The User's Manual for the Brain Volume I by Bob G Bodenhamer

Author:Bob G Bodenhamer [Bodenhamer, Bob G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1899836357
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2010-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

10.8.0.43 4. The Forgotten “Mind”

We call unconscious the “mind” within us where we store all of our memories and prior experiences. In the 1950s, Penfield and other researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of various parts of the brain triggered automatic recall of long forgotten experiences. These “recalls” did not merely involve the “data” in a pure or cold form, but a seeming re-experiencing of the information. At that time, they concluded that everything we ever experience gets recorded and stored somewhere.

Later research studies, however, questioned this universal quantifier. Theorists eventually concluded that while much of what we experience does get recorded, not everything does. We do not record in “memory” what we do not attend or pay attention to. Our “not-knowing” of that information does not mean that “it is unconscious.” It may mean that we didn’t encode it in the first place. Thus just because someone has a “dark area” on their Time-Line does not necessarily mean that they have experienced some trauma. They may have just not encoded anything of significance during that period. Or they may have lost interest in it so that it slipped away.

Further, we can and do forget things. We can lose memory of previous learnings, experiences, conversations, etc. Just go through old boxes of reports and notes that you wrote when you attended school twenty or thirty years ago. Or read journal writings of everyday conversations, experiences, and happenings from five years ago—and experience the surprise of not even recognizing much of it. Not only has it become unconscious, it has become unconscious and inaccessible.

I (MH) did this recently with old notes I came across that I made from some calculus, trigonometry, and advanced mathematics classes. Not only had I forgotten that I had taken such notes—I couldn’t even recall the learnings in a way that could make sense of the information. “What in the world do these formulas mean? I can’t believe that I once knew this stuff!”

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