My week has been flush with forays into how our unconscious mind determines, well, pretty much our entire life. I've been reading a book intended for a popular audience, David Brook's The Social Animal, a short ebook on how to increase the probability that we'll succeed in achieving a particular goal, 9 Things Successful People Do Differently, and an academic paper proposing that conscious thought evolved to support the cognitive demands of a social existence. (Now that I can buy books again, I have Thinking, Fast and Slow right next to me. If I could have found it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, that would have been the first book on my 2012 reading list.) While sitting in my living room trying to corral my stampeding thoughts into either a coherent blog post or review of Brook's book, I had an encounter with my unconscious.
The result of that encounter is the title of this post. The content of my reading has been swirling around in my head, mixing with my obsession with Ericsson, a desire to understand the origins of my behavior, a sense that I want to accomplish something Important, and a discontent with my professional situation. Parts of my brain that I am not aware of have been reconciling all of these various threads. When I started trying to pull all my various thoughts together to write something vaguely intelligent, the aware part of my mind stumbled over this nugget that has been sitting on my mental bookshelf patiently awaiting discovery. I'll delve into the insight before I wander off into my new perspective on how I came to have this idea.
When a musician lies in bed thinking about their ultimate goal, it more than likely involves playing a very difficult and beautiful piece of music in a prominent venue. From that moment, he can start having a very detailed simulation of that experience as a fantasy (this idea comes from the academic paper). There are also steps that he can take to ensure that his skill will rise to the point that he will be able to perform whatever piece of music he aspires to perform (see the ebook, or the HBR blog post). If this musician achieves his ambition, his focus during the performance will not be on making the music. Making the music will be automatic. His fingers will feel like they are acting of their own accord. His mind will be focused on some other aspect of the performance.
Making the music, playing the correct notes at the appropriate time, will be automatic. That's what I mean by exceptional automatic responses. Playing the music isn't something the musician has to think about, like how you and I don't have to concentrate on our fingers when we button a shirt or tie our shoes. Our fingers just know what to do without our input. Playing music automatically basically relies on the same system. It's just a little better developed. Developing the skills required to perform a complex composition automatically are years in the making. The process of the musician's brain that is aware of what it is doing has spent a long time over that part of the brain that controls how to perform music. By spending 10,000 hours focusing on the connections in that part (or, more likely, parts) of the brain, our musician is able to achieve his dream.
Exceptional performance in sports, music, surgery, or other activities that have well defined and predictable standards comes about when somebody commits to developing highly developed automatic responses. What are these automatic responses? They are merely neural networks. Well-defined, honed, and efficient neural networks, but that's what they are (at least that's my understanding). A football player doesn't consciously think about which cut to make or how to respond to a particular situation. They just react unconsciously. Their brain sends a signal to their muscles, but a conscious input is not required to achieve that input. What if you don't compete in an arena that has predictable challenges? How do you practice for an unknown situation? If your job is to solve problems, how to you get better at solving problems?
You work on solving problems, of course. The more you work to consciously solve problems, the better you will be able to resolve them. Eventually, solving a problem won't require conscious effort. You'll be thinking about something else when the solution to your problem suddenly becomes clear. That aha moment came from some part of the brain that was operating while your awareness was on what you wanted for dinner or a conversation with a friend about somebody a mutual friend just started dating. By deliberately working to solve problems, an automatic problem solving function was installed in your brain. Our entire brain does it's thing wherever our awareness is at a particular moment. The problem solving parts work on the problems even when you're not thinking about that problem. Our brain may solve the problem well before we're aware that we've found a solution.
The better we are able to train our brain to work on things when we're not thinking about, the better we'll be able to rely on our associative memory to go deeper into our storehouse of knowledge to find related facts, try a few combinations of those facts, and present us with a solution to a problem that we stopped focusing on hours, days, or weeks ago.
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