Humans are dominated by a lot of old-mind imperatives, revolving around the need to stay safe.

    There are about 100,000,000,000 nerve cells in the brain. Up to about half of them are devoted to seeing. There are no prizes for guessing why that fact is placed on this website for your consideration.

    Much of the incoming visual data remains below the surface of our thinking. We don’t realize it’s going on, but our unconscious minds constantly use the right hemisphere of our brains to check out all sorts of things. Note how when a visitor steps into a sitting room and someone there flips the mute switch on the remote control, nevertheless every eye in the room will keep wandering back to the flickering television images. It's just the same as the way  humans in pre-history used to sit around the fire and watched it flicker. The old visual responses are still there. 

                                      

    The process comes from the need to keep us safe from being run over by cars, or hit by stray golf balls, and much more besides. This is hard-wired in from our hunting and gathering days in pre-history when our ancestors had to watch for enemies and hungry animals.

    We often think of the subconscious mind acting more slowly than this to help us organize our lives. Certainly it does that as well.

    Here’s a metaphor for the way it works:

    Imagine living in a wide, spacious room with everything you need, including cooking facilities at one end and big windows to gaze out through. One day while looking out at the view you’re conscious of a tiny movement somewhere but when you turn around, everything is still. This is a bit puzzling. Returning to the window, you then seem to hear a sound behind you. This time you whip around quickly, but again there’s nothing. Next time when you look for the kettle to boil some water, you find it, but it’s not quite where you thought it was. You might think that’s a bit strange, but you shrug and pick it up and use it. Next, you look for your notebook, and that seems to be open at a different page from the way you put it down – or is it? In any case, when you open it you find you have several new thoughts to record, which is pleasing. You do that, put it down, and turn away. Three hours later, you seem once more to have this sense of a movement behind you, but again, when you spin round, there’s nothing to see….

    What’s happening is this: in the middle of the room there’s a concealed trapdoor, and underneath that there’s a big hand. It flashes out and picks things up and pulls them down to the cellar to repair and improve them. The door’s timed so that you can never see it – any time you spin round, thinking something’s going on, it’s going to be impossible to see because the trap is wired to activate automatically at great speed as you start to turn, and the hand puts back whatever it’s moved long before you can see it. The more you try to see it consciously, the more determined it will be to ensure that you don’t. There are these occasional flickerings, though, that alert you to the fact that something’s going on back there. And that’s about all – there’s nothing you can put your finger on.

    Why?

    This is an old-mind brain function designed to keep us safe. In order to negotiate dangerous bends in the river and to stay clear of falling branches, we need to devote our consciousness to the real and present world, looking, listening, stepping carefully through the undergrowth (in times past) and the business world (today). The brain function has actually divided so that it can work at a different level, beneath consciousness, not disturbing the effectiveness of the conscious processes devoted to staying alive in the moment, but at the same time feeding in data to help the organism to function more effectively long-term.
    
    Today, there are often unrecognized longer-term benefits of this in helping us with, say, writing tasks that are left overnight. We note they get easier next day because the subconscious has been working on them while we were asleep. But there are also echoes of it in different parts of our lives. Many of us have a friend who’s a genius when it comes to finding vacant car-parking places. This comes from the right brain of that individual having developed a particular skill. That person can unconsciously see way ahead the telltale signs of someone moving towards a parked vehicle, shopping under one arm and keys in one hand. A minute later when the car pulls alongside, it’s just in time to find the place becoming vacant.

  

    When we’re weeding in the garden, after a few minutes of pulling out unwanted plants, we find ourselves emphasizing one particular quarter of our field of vision – we know there’s a weed lurking there somewhere, because the right brain has seen it. We can’t put a hand out to pluck it up because it takes a moment for the left brain to catch up and locate it accurately. In a moment or two of scanning, the left hemisphere will spot it and then we can act. Or, in another instance, we might be cooking and handling a mixture. We prepare the ingredients, drop them into piles and begin working with them. At the end of the process it’s surprising how often the amounts will tally to exactly meet the space in the dish or whatever it might be. The right brain has unconsciously affected our preparations and set us up to apportion the correct amounts.

    The unconscious mind works with its own agenda. To do well at many pursuits – imagine a movement in a sporting activity – it’s necessary to avoid thinking about them, because that interferes with the unconscious judgement. In many ways, such as in reflex to avoid being hit by a swinging door, we let the subconscious do its thing.

    The unconscious mind makes very rapid decisions, heavily based on what we see, and predicated on keeping us safe. It has no sense of humour and no sense of what’s real and what’s make-believe. That’s why people jump and scream in horror movies. It’s not appropriate to put anything whatever on a website that might startle the unconscious mind by implying an age-old danger, because it puts people off in a way they can’t describe afterwards. They just leave the site. It’s as simple as that. The decision’s been made at a deep level and they’re gone – maybe straight to the site of a business competitor.