Unconscious Intelligence

At first it may seem counter-intuitive to beginners in mindfulness meditation or Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, but unconsciousness too is a necessary facet to healthy living, and contracting consciousness can sometimes be just as useful as expanding consciousness (in fact, the two are intertwined).

If one becomes a good enough practitioner of mindfulness meditation or CBT, one will come to realize that non-awareness, too, is not only an unavoidable aspect of mind, but a valuable counterforce that contributes to our psychological homeostasis.

I am talking about deliberate non-awareness – which is really just a slightly more descriptive way of saying “letting go.” To let go is to lack concern – to shift consciousness away from (and, perhaps, toward more important things).

Like economic resources (raw materials, capital, labor, time) our mental resources are finite, and it is up to us to allocate how they are spent. Consciousness – or awareness – is the currency of exchange.

If you are pitching a baseball game, but you are worried about the fans booing you or your girlfriend cheating on you or a pigeon flying by and shitting on your head – you are diverting focus – and, therefore, not concentrating all your resources efficiently in the moment (what if the pitcher was in a better state of flow?).

It has been shown that our working memory can only hold so many isolated bits of information at one point (see George Miller’s “The Magic Number 7, Plus or Minus Two: Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information“), so it can be concluded that, to some extent, there is a decision to be made on what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

We’ve all had those periods in our life where we spend day and night worrying about something in the past. We can’t let it go, and it eats away at our ability to think and live fully in the present. But part of practicing consciousness is practicing letting go of consciousness (or practicing unconsciousness) – and as paradoxical as it sounds, it is accurate. Mindfulness after all is being aware when something enters your consciousness, and letting go of it when it is no longer there (the “rising” and “falling” of sensation – the sound of a bird chirping, and the inevitability of its cessation).

Non-deliberate non-awareness can be just as useful. The most obvious example is sleep, which helps to maintain cognitive sharpness as well as the consolidation of long-term memories. It is a way for the mind to shut itself off from the moment-by-moment experience of time so that it can unconsciously process the information that has been gathered throughout the day (of course, sleep also serves multiple forms of bodily regulation as well as psychological – which contributes even more to its necessity).

Here is another example of non-awareness being beneficial – perhaps you are familiar with it: if you are some kind of artist or musician, and you spend a significant amount of time away from your craft (months/years), have you ever noticed that when you get back into it you seem to have somehow improved? Sure there might be a couple hours/days before you dust off the mechanics, but once you catch up to your previous level of skill it is almost as if you have developed a new layer of intuitiveness or understanding. Might something have built up unconsciously?

Perhaps intuition in itself is a byproduct of unconscious intelligence. I have seen many people argue intuition as “a laser fast version of logic,” a logic that is performed unconsciously. Certainly it can be argued that there are levels of understanding that seem to lay beyond verbally-expressed reason – so perhaps these can be attributed to unconscious processes of knowledge – a contextual understanding that we can’t pick apart into individual bits of knowledge.

Unfortunately, intuition has become a kind of taboo in Western Psychology, along with unconsciousness itself, because of its difficulty in being studied under a scientific, third person framework. This taboo has in-itself contributed to the inefficacy of scientists to figure out more about intuition or to develop any explanation regarding its evolutionary origins.

However, it has been illustrated that many people use intuition and are wrong – so, a scientist might say, intuition is inaccurate and untrustworthy or perhaps even delusional (?) – but perhaps each individual must work with their unconscious individually before wielding its benefits (just like people are bad at reason, or writing, or swimming, or playing the guitar, or any other skill). I don’t see enough evidence to altogether dismiss using intuition (a form of unconscious reasoning) as a means of knowledge or practical decision-making.

Perhaps the most extreme form of alleged unconscious intelligence can be attributed to revelations and mystical experiences. These claims to knowledge, like intuition, are subject to the same modern day scientific scrutiny, and often times (if you compare the modern definitions with the religious experiences) equatable to mental disorders. I don’t think this is a fair characterization however, and I believe there is a lot more study that needs to be done to draw conclusions on the psycho-”spiritual” factors of revelations and the supposed knowledge acquired through those experiences.

Either way, and perhaps on multiple levels, unconsciousness should be a facet of mind that we can welcome.

Note: This post was meant to focus on the potential good aspects of unconsciousness, it’s “intelligence,” but obviously not all of it is good. Some of it can be incredibly unhealthy – such as aversion to important things that require our attention or false beliefs in the reality of dreams. This post is not meant to glorify delusional thinking – only to question our understanding of the unconscious mind and what it may have to offer. I will try write about the caveats of the unconscious in future posts. Please join my newsletter for updates.