Conscious Vs Subconscious Mind: Learn The Difference

Before jumping right into the chief characteristics of the two minds, I want to make a distinction between the terms “brain” and “mind”. Though they are commonly misused, they refer to quite different things: the brain is that three-pound organ in your head. The “mind” is something larger and more elusive. From a Western point of view, the brain is the physical anatomy and the mind is what the brain generates through its activity. From an Eastern point of view, some say, the mind is the source of the thoughts supplied to the brain.

If we want to successfully reprogram ourselves, we must first learn some basics about the human mind. The first is that it is divided into two separate parts working together: the conscious and the subconscious mind:

The conscious mind is all our reasoning, stream of thoughts, will, decisions, plans, visualizations, efforts when we try to learn a new skill… All the activity that we feel is going on inside our skull is under the influence of our conscious mind.

If we add the prefix “sub” to it, it will mean under, below, beneath, lower. The subconscious is then all our mind that we can’t access directly. It manifests itself in our dreams, emotions, behaviors, body language, impulses, and all the learned skills, like walking, cooking, writing and driving. The subconscious mind is also responsible for instinctive body functions: digestion, heartbeat, hormonal secretion…You don’t consciously decide to grow your hair or to regenerate your skin. Can you imagine if you had to make conscious effort to breathe?

In the early 1800’s, when students of human behavior first began to realize that the mind was dual in its operation, it was felt that the conscious mind, with its ability to think, scheme, plan and reason, would naturally be the master mind and that the other one would be subservient to it. This is far from being the truth: no one ever has had or will have as much intelligence, consciously, as all of us have subconsciously. Let’s take an example to illustrate this.

If a ball comes near our eye, the slower conscious mind may not have time to be aware of the threatening projectile. Yet the subconscious mind, which processes some 20,000,000 environmental stimuli per second versus 40 environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind in the same second, will cause the eye to blink (Bruce Lipton – The Biology of Beliefs).

Freud used the analogy of the iceberg to compare the power between the two minds, where the conscious would be its top, and the subconscious mind the part underneath the surface.

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