Subconsciousness
There exists a collection of psychological oddities- varieties of the uncanny- that crop up again and again, requiring a coat of explanatory whitewash.
There is random bad luck that seems, without a doubt, unreasonable, unfair. There are surges of physical strength or emotion that well up from the blue, uncharacteristic acts of bravery or overwhelming passions of love. There are experiences that confuse reality and imagination, visual hallucinations or voices inside your head that tell you what to do. There are moments of grace when personality drops away and overwhelming peace relieves people of all anxiety and dissatisfaction. There are moments of inspiration when genuinely novel and valuable ideas come into consciousness without any train of thought leading up to them. There are subtler intimations of knowing, inklings, hunches and feelings with no rational antecedents that can turn your stomach or make your hair stand on end.
There are self-defeating or destructive impulses of obsessive, compulsive behavior. There are periods of melancholy or mania that have no apparent cause. There is cruelty, so aghast, ‘human nature’ does not adequately explain. There are Freudian slips that, for the moment, grab our tongues and spill the beans. Dreams and visions are pregnant with symbolic and elusive significance. There is the paranormal, the world of telepathy and precognition. There is the ‘automatic pilot’ that seems to do very smart things while consciousness is elsewhere. There is subliminal perception and the ‘sixth sense’ that tells you, without any other indicators, there is someone else in the room. There is ‘blindsight’, people can inexplicably see or hear without experience of vision or sound.
If you add them up, there is a mountain of details that do not square with common sense and stand in need of explanation.
Our brains, alone, are not enough. We need inner and outer explanation. We need, both, the amygdala and the Devil.
The Wayward Mind
Guy Claxton
