Yvonne Oswald explains how your unconscious mind processes far more than your conscious mind can handle, using deletion, distortion, and generalization to filter information. Your conscious mind chunks only 7±2 items at once, while emotions distort memories and early beliefs shape your behavior and body.
Yvonne Oswald. So while your conscious mind is taking in information, your unconscious mind, or subconscious— the only difference is the spelling— is taking in a lot more information. It actually absorbs 2 million bits of information every second.. It puts those bits into groups of 126, and you're only aware consciously of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information that you can actually absorb at any one second. The unconscious mind is doing a big job while you're observing an event. It's got running what's called a meta-program, and the meta-program actually deletes, distorts, and generalizes information so that it can become understandable for the conscious mind. Number 1, it deletes huge amounts of information. Otherwise, we'd be absolutely inundated with too much information coming in, too many distractions, and a lot of the information is simply just deleted. The second thing is the unconscious mind generalizes things so that it becomes easily understandable. So if you see a little animal walking along the road and it's got 4 legs and it's going, "Bark, bark, bark," and it's got a little tail going, you know it's a dog. Then you can get more specific and say what kind of dog it is. The most interesting part about the unconscious mind is that it distorts information too. So here's the interesting thing: if you take in information like tables, chairs, houses, etc., when you come to retrieve it from your unconscious mind— because that's what— where it stores the memories and all the information— it comes back virtually the same. However, if you store it and there are emotions attached to it, it can come back distorted because of your— how you perceive it happening. So let me give you an example. Years ago, I was living in England and I was in a big Victorian house. There were 9 of us living there and we suddenly heard breaking glass. We all went running to the top of the stairs and looked down the stairs and there is a hand coming around the door to open— through the glass to open the door. And the door opened and this man stood there. We all agreed he was a man. Then what happened was he went, "Ahh!" and we went, "Ahh!" and we all went running down the road after him and he took off at a rate of knots and then the police were involved, they came along, they said, "What did he look like?" Well, he was Chinese, he was Indian, he was black, he was white, he was wearing a bomber jacket, he wasn't wearing a jacket at all, he was wearing a hat, he had no hat on, he had a beard, he didn't have a beard and all 9 of us had a different opinion about what this man was. And the— finally, the policeman just put a note through all— a line through all his notes and just said, that's it, I'm good, I'm done. Eyewitness accounts are not reliable. And the reason for that is that we had projected onto this man everything that we feared. So the fear came up for us, we projected onto this man, whoever he was, whoever, whatever we were afraid of. My guy was a bomber guy from the '60s. You know, the big— the guys who were on the motorbikes, and he was wearing a leather jacket and he was like cool and everything. And they were the guys I was afraid of when I was a teenager because they were going around with knives and things. So like, yeah, so I literally saw the man I was afraid of. Um, and that's the reason why when we say perception is projection, we perceive something— we're not really perceiving who— what we really see, we're perceiving the projection of what we believe to be true. That's really important too when you've got people talking about you at home when people say, you know, you're not this or you are this, they're simply talking about themselves. Carl Jung said you cannot see in someone else that which you don't have in yourself. So all you need to think if someone's been unkind to you is think, gosh, lamb kid, is that how you feel about yourself? You don't need to say it. However, it takes away the sting a lot. So once you perceive the information, you've deleted it, you've distorted it, you've generalized it, then it becomes a feeling inside. You have what's called an internal representation, a feeling of what it feels like when you, when you have this event happens. That internal representation can be all kinds of things. It can be happy, sad, it can be depending on what's happening. It's going to trigger memories from the past, from before you were 7 years old. Then your physiology will change. If it's a happy event, you'll be like this, your whole body language will go up. If it's not a happy event, your body language might go down a bit. Then that results in a behavior. So there's a lot of things going on in your conscious mind and your unconscious mind before you actually produce a behavior. And all this takes maybe a second or two. So it's very interesting how fast your unconscious mind works. It's there for your survival, it's there to help you live, and it's there to give you the best it can. And what we have to remember is there are a lot of limiting beliefs there from before you were 7 years old that we need to clear before we can move forward in happiness and joy with our GPS set for success.
