Two Minds: Thinking and Emotional.
The mind is a strange place; a private, subjective theatre of ongoing streams of thoughts and conscious body sensations. But also, a part of the mind that can observe, like a spectator in a crowd of the play, the unfolding drama, of sorts. But the spectator is also like a director of the play onstage, and can decide to change the plot line, the characters, the sentiment. Try it! Try changing your recurring plot line.
Difficult? Sure. It is just so easy to be distracted by sensory information. Exhibit A: social media content and places of entertainment. Let’s unpack the mind into chewable pieces.
Ray Dalio splits the inner stage (‘mind’) into two components: the thinking mind and the emotional mind. Both are autonomous but struggle with the other: sometimes the thinking (read: rational) mind is the boss; and the emotional (feelings) mind is subservient. In a blink of an eye, there can be role reversal. And revved up feelings can boil over and disturb rational thought. Road rage. Revenge. Panic. Greed. A black swan event. Fear. And pain, hunger, and thirst, and drug withdrawal.
There is plenty to fear about artificial intelligence. But I cannot fathom how coding will generate emotions in a microchip; how AI will incorporate intuition. I cannot get my head around the reality of the continual combat between emotions and thought, and how machines will be able to intuit situations. Intuition is a combination of both emotions and (unconscious) thoughts, that needs a conscious platform to respond to, and act upon.
Thoughts can be manipulated into memes, into algorithms, into machine learning. Emotions are a mixture of body sensations where chemicals and hormones and ‘hot’ memories are the information sources, that sometimes, but not always, seep into consciousness. At time of writing I don’t recall reading of a lab that can produce any molecule from basic forms such as atoms. Good luck to AI engineers.
I am intrigued by the neural connections between the thinking mind (predominantly residing in the prefrontal cortices) and the emotional mind (predominantly living in the more ancient limbic system). Neuroscience suggests that full maturation of the connecting plumbing is the early 20s. Before, and especially in teenagehood, emotions can be more powerful.
And around 22/23 years there seems to be a more resonable responses from most humans. In fact, it maybe prudent to only allow voting, driving licences, liquor use, and military conscription from age 22. Ask any short term insurance company: most accidents involve 18-23 year olds.
Reflecting on 25 years of my mindfulness research and practice is that the core competitive advantage is on the interconnecting networks between the two minds – thinking and emotional – that optimise, as well those networks that allow the third mind to stand back, so to speak, and distance somewhat and observe the play between thought and emotion. And then power of redirecting information content and emotional charge.
Change your thinking, change your life!
Lesson). Your internal world is an eternal struggle between the thinking and emotional minds.
(Reference: Life Principles by Ray Dalio.)