Conscious vs Unconscious Minds

Did something like the following every happen to you:

You get in your car because you want to drive to the supermarket. You start driving and all of a sudden, you become aware that you have parked your car at the parking  lot of the supermarket. This may seem nothing out of the ordinary except you cannot remember how you got there. 

You start thinking ... and even worry because you know that on the way there were at least three traffic lights ... Did you blank out because regardless of how much you try to figure it out, you cannot fill in the blanks. 

You start thinking and wondering if you stopped at each light? Chances are high that you did stop ... that is unless you received a bunch of traffic violation tickets in the mail later on.

So how is this possible? How do we loose track of time and how did we get safely to the supermarket?

The picture below (Freud's Mental Ice Berg) shows a simplified version of our mind. 10% of our brain is what we are aware of (consciousness): It is the seat of our ego and it is where we make our decisions. About 90% of our brain is our unconsciousness (sometimes also called subconsciousness). 

Our conscious mind is filled with every day thoughts. At the point you were driving to the supermarket, you may have had your shopping list in mind. You may even have mentally gone through your home to see if you still needed something that was not on the list. So, you visualized your home instead of concentrating on the road. Your conscious mind was busy mentally checking out if you still had fabric softener or milk in your refrigerator. 

With your conscious mind being occupied, the unconscious mind takes over. As for the above case scenario, you have been driving the same route for a long time so your unconscious mind was already familiar with each stop light, with each bend in the road, or with each cross road. Since your conscious mind was busy with going over the shopping list, your unconscious mind took over.  

The unconscious mind is the seat of Id and Superego, of our intuition, of our memories and knowledge, as well as our emotions and fears. So every time you remember something, you pull it out of the "storage space" of your unconscious mind. Neurological pathways help you with this retrieval as well with the storage. Lapses in memory are problems with the retrieval. It is like forgetting where you put your keys. At that instant, you cannot remember where you placed (stored) them. 

As I said above, the graphic is very simplified because our brain also has several levels. Cognition, for example, takes place in the frontal cortex whereas our emotions are situation in the limbic system, with the fight-or-flight response being triggered from the reptilian brain (the brain stem and cerebellum). 

Now bringing it back to our scenario described above. Driving from point A to Be without being fully aware and present would constitute as daydreaming. Going a step further, one could also say that daydreaming or being in deep thought is just another form of being hypnotized. During hypnosis, you are very relaxed thus your conscious mind is "not paying attention" while your unconscious mind is very active. It is like not paying attention when somebody else is talking and all of a sudden you hear your name. Snap ... your conscious mind is being "brought back" to pay attention. While under hypnosis, you have a heightened sense of awareness. This heightened sense of awareness would let you jump into action in case of an emergency. 

It never ceases to amaze me how incredible powerful our mind is.