In bingo, the old guy at the front turns a cage of numbered ping pong balls. They clatter around in the tumbler and there’s no way to tell what ball is what.
Then he hits a lever, releases a ball down the slot, picks it up and says, “N22,” or “B6,” or “O12.”
He does this over and over throughout the game.
Our minds are similar. Imagine every thought as a bingo ball. Thousands of thought-balls bounce around in our cranial cage. Most stay in the cage, and we have no idea what they are and what they’re doing. But a few go down the slot, where we identify them one by one.
Cage Balls – Unconscious Thoughts
Psychologists and neuroscientists call the cage-balls unconscious or automatic thoughts. Unconscious thoughts bobble around in a flurry of activity behind the scenes, directing our hearts to pump blood, driving our instincts and habits and so on. These unconscious, automatic thoughts make for lots of activity in the cage, but we’re not sure what ball is where and what’s doing what.
Slot Balls – Conscious Thoughts
Then there are the balls we send down the slot and identify one by one, which neuroscientists call conscious thoughts. They’re the things we know we’re thinking about moment by moment. Here’s a sample stream of conscious thought…
- What should I eat next?
- A bucket of fried chicken sounds good.
- Will it make me fat?
- It’s been a long time since I worked out.
- Oh, no. I’m getting fatter.
- But I really don’t want to work out.
- There’s Donna. How does she stay in such good shape?
- Donna makes me sick.
- It’s no use.
- I might as well eat a gallon of ice cream and a big bag of m&m’s.
Conscious thoughts flow through our minds like bingo balls in line, rolling down the thought-slot one at a time.
Fast-Wide versus Slow-Narrow
While unconscious thoughts are fast and flurry-ous, happening all at once, conscious thoughts are slower and more restricted. “The capacity of conscious contents at any single moment is surprisingly limited,” writes Bernard Baars, Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “We cannot read this sentence and listen to a conversation at the same time. Nor can we pay attention to the s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g of a word without taking a risk that we will miss some of its meaning.”1 We can’t multitask at the conscious thought-level. We can switch back and forth quickly between thoughts, but we’re not very good at it, and truth is, there’s still only one ball of conscious thought rolling down the thought-slot at a time.
Again, there are cage-balls (unconscious thoughts), and slot-balls (conscious thoughts). In the cage, lots of things happening at once. But in the slot, only one thing happening at a time.
Controlling the Thought-Slot
Unlike the old bingo guy, we can choose our slot-balls. We decide our focus. We choose what gets and keeps our attention.
When we roll the right balls down the thought-slot, when we take control of the way we think, we begin to take control of the way we live.
1Bernard J. Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 39.
