Thoughts on thinking

It starts with the nerve endings; billions of them, all over your body, receiving input, sending little packets of data up the pipeline like tributaries feeding into a river.  The data is immensely specific, and there's an immense amount of it, all flooding up your spinal column and into the brain.  And your brain, on the bottommost level, is the hub in which all this data is sorted, repackaged, formatted and redirected to the factory floor of the subconscious for manufacturing, for processing and building.  This is where the magic happens.

It's a factory too vast to comprehend.  It's where memories are stored, where tactile data is interpreted, where involuntary muscle reactions are programmed and sent out.  This is where impulse is created, where light and colors, smells and sounds become emotions, where emotions become urges.  This is where what happens to you passes through the filter of who you are, where data beyond comprehension is turned into a sphere of understanding.  It's the powerhouse of the brain, but you 'see' very little of it.  

What you 'see' instead is consciousness.  The phonographic loop, the internal monologue.  If the subconscious is a factory, the conscious is surely the marketing team of the brain, constantly working, advertising, slapping together disjointed thoughts and memories with bureaucratic ineptitude in a vain attempt to create something meaningful.   The subconscious is full of specialists who are staggeringly competent; the conscious is the suit-and-ties who attempt to put it all together, but understand very little.  This can be good - the subconscious knows how to spell words, play notes, but the conscious is what writes the poem, or plays the song - but it can also be bad.  The conscious doesn't really have any impulse control.  The world is their sample group.  When you're driving on the freeway, you don't know whether your next thought will be a gleam of understanding into the song on the radio, or a terrifyingly clear flash of desire to see what happens if you slam the parking brake right now.  You really just don't know.  

So you don't want the marketing team in control of everything.  Think of when you're at your best, when you're doing something - a sport, music, art, for me this has never been as pure as it was in marching band - something that takes up all your focus, and the conscious mind just stands back, their skills no longer needed.  Suddenly you don't know who you are, or when you are, you only know what you're doing, and all those workers down on the factory floor are doing their jobs as well as they ever had.  This is nirvana, the real deal, the one and only.  It is mind and body in unison.  When the world is burning and nothing makes sense, when rage or terror or love grips you and the instinct kicks in, this is who you are.  The conscious mind will always have its part to play, but when it comes down to doing something real, without the second-guessing and double-checking, you don't want a think tank.  You want a construction crew.  

This is just the way I like to think of it.  Scientifically speaking, there's not a lot of research that went into this.  I don't study brains for a living.  But I do have one, which I think makes me qualified to at least think about it.