The Unconscious Mind

I saw the bus coming towards me just as I was planning to cross the road and unconsciously calculated in my head how fast I have to walk before the bus reaches the area of road I was crossing so as to avoid collision and my ending up in a hospital bed. I used here ‘unconsciously’ because I only realised how efficient the human mind is in calculating after I got to the other side. I thought on about how our mind processes things; it somehow assesses situations unconsciously and gives out logical conclusions still unconsciously, and the most wonderful thing about this process is that it can be performed unconsciously by even the stupidest person! [Whoa, that's three 'unconsciously' in one sentence!] So basically, doesn’t that mean we are all born experts in Statistics? If so, then wouldn’t that be contradictory to the fact that Statistics doesn’t come easy to majority of people and is at most times considered a very tough subject to master. The high pay of Actuaries kind of proves this point.

My train of thought was on a roll; another insight I had was how powerful the unconscious mind actually is! Powerful enough to alter human behaviour as conceived by Freud in his work on psychoanalysis. And the fact that I’d just recently watched the very interesting film adaptation A Dangerous Method fuelled my curiosity for the psychology field of study, so yes I ended up downloading iBooks and audiobooks on it. I’m presently going through them one at a time and they have proved to be interesting reads so far. Hopefully I will be able to answer my own whimsical questions someday in a silent self-conversation so as not to further publicly embarrass myself! 

These self-indulgent musings I had on human’s natural abilities and unconscious powers did not go very far at that moment due to lack of knowledge in said fields but it did interest me enough to make me take action on new learning, so I suppose it was productive in one way. Randomness has a way of seeping into everything in my inconspicuous unassuming life and it doesn't spare my posts either; I realised these few days how everyone is so overly snobbish and was going to write a whole dedicated post about it but then, the reflective habit which the British education system has now seemed to imbibe in me took over. It was a good thing I reflected because of two reasons: first, it discouraged me to write that whole post about it and secondly, it belatedly dawned on me how hypocritical I was being since there is a high probability I would be no different if I walked past myself and saw my face in my off-mood days! Ah great, another revelation of weakness I will need to change ;)