Rational AND Intuitive -- Just the Tip...

“Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

“Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

“‘We think our decisions are conscious,’ said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. ‘But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg’ …

“In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information…

“Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.

“Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

“Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better they reported.”

(“Currents; Science Journal: Get Out of Your Own Way; Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision.” Robert Lee Hotz. Wall Street Journal: June 27, 2008. pg. A.9)

I THINK THAT I am thinking. What do we see when we observe our own thought processes?

Stop the war between the head and the heart, the mind and the gut, knowing and feeling. Learn to balance both sides; add richness to your understanding.

Yang AND Yin.