Your Cognizant Mind

The Cognizant Mind is currently one of the most misunderstood parts of the human experience. It’s been called many things: your right brain, intuition (women’s or otherwise), gut feeling, creativity, the subconscious, “following your heart,” even hocus pocus and new-age bullshit. And on some level, depending on what’s being said about it, each of those is partly true, but none of them sufficiently encompass the whole of the Cognizant Mind or how (or why) it functions. Yet (as you can see by all the names we as a society have coined for it), it is very much a part of our ethos and everyday vernacular. We talk about it like something we collectively know exists in some form and which most of us tend to take into account in our daily lives in one way or another. But we have yet to successfully define it, and as such it currently holds residency within the realm of fuzzy nomenclature, relegated to pithy sayings and motivational posters. This article will try to bring some of this mystery into the light of hard, observational definition.

Undoubtedly, the most unnerving aspect of the Cognizant Mind for most people will be the startling revelation that your Cognizant Mind is its own thinking intelligence operating independently (but hopefully cooperatively) inside the confines of your brain. It is part of you, but it is separate from your Operative Mind - the part that feels more like “you” - in the sense that it does not answer to your Operative Mind; it is not controlled by it, at least not absolutely. The Cognitive Mind must be respected and negotiated with to be able to take full advantage of its power and counsel. But while it would be wrong to say that your Cognizant Mind is a whole other person (it doesn’t have separate emotions or decision-making processes, for example), it definitely does perform its own calculations that are apart and sometimes in contradiction with your Operative Mind, and it retains its own separate memory storage. Effectively, you are two minds living inside the same skull and sharing the same body, acting (mostly) in concert. And as much as that might initially feel invasive or scary to think there is suddenly someone else living inside your head, the truth is that this other mind has always been with you. Like your own twin that was born when you were and grew up with you, learning the ropes alongside you, cooperating with you while you were learning to walk and how to speak. You’ve always been together, and you have been living a symbiotic relationship, learning to take different roles and responsibilities and sharing information back and forth between you. The fact that you’ve always done this instinctively doesn’t make it any less real. Your Cognizant Mind has always been a part of your full self, just as your spleen has always been a part of your body, performing its function, even before you knew what a spleen was or how it worked.

How your Cognitive Mind works can itself be behind a bit of mysterious opacity, but a word picture might help clear it up: imagine you’re sitting in a room with nothing but a computer screen and a keyboard. Not a modern, sleek, graphical operating system, but an old teletype where the black screen has green text on it. You can only type in a line of text and receive text in response. This is akin to how your Cognitive Mind communicates with your Operative Mind (I’ll use cog mind and op mind for short). Your op mind sends your cog mind a question, and then must sit and wait for an answer. Sometimes the answer comes back immediately, other times, you’re sitting staring at a blinking cursor while it thinks. In fact, it is somewhat common for your cog mind to think on something for days or sometimes even years before giving an answer back. Have you ever been in the shower thinking about something else, and suddenly a solution pops into your mind for a problem that’s been vexing you for the past week? That is your cog mind finally returning an answer to a question you posed it a week ago. As you might guess, this communication happens at a much lower level than human language (you two were aware of each other and communicating before you even learned your native tongue, after all) and happens naturally in the sense that you send messages back and forth without consciously trying to.

Luckily, your Operative Mind is free to pose its query and then get up from the metaphorical computer terminal and go do other things about the room while it waits for an answer. And, unlike the computer terminal in our analogy, it doesn’t have to wait until it gets an answer from one question before it can ask another. In this way, your op mind can have your cog mind working on several problems at once, and the cog mind will happily work on all of them in parallel, returning each answer as the calculations conclude. In fact, your cog mind’s involvement is so common throughout everyday life, that you are likely unaware of it happening. Like a painting that has always been in your childhood home, it is part of the background and effectively invisible to you. As some common examples, when you ask yourself, “What do I feel like for lunch?” “What outfit is right for this event?,” or “Do I trust this person I’m about to do business with,” unless you are the strictly analytical person who makes every decision with scientific precision and mathematical reasoning, that was your Operative Mind asking your Cognitive Mind a question and getting an immediate (or fairly immediate) answer back. Your cog mind is performing massive calculations for you in the background - weighing which meals you’ve had recently to maintain variety, possibly checking with your body to see what nutritional elements might be lacking and checking its own internal database for which foods address those deficiencies, running through catalogs of past eating experiences for each generalized food type to remember not only whether you liked this food the first or last time you had it but also how often you liked it and the generalized probability that it will be good this time, as well as things like how tired you are and how much effort you should spend on either procuring or preparing (or even eating) the meal - plus a hundred other minor factors including whom you’re likely to be eating with, what their preferences might be (itself its own sub-computation), and how your relationship with this person will be affected by making the “wrong” choice, and how much you care. Obviously if your Operative Mind were to try to undertake these calculations itself, it would require perhaps an hour and several legal pads and charts and graphs, or possibly a bulletin board and lots of red string to be able to reach the same conclusion - clearly impractical for daily life. But your cog mind performs this level of calculation with ease. This is awfully convenient for your day-to-day operations and is a feature most people take advantage of intuitively, to some degree or another.

And this is precisely the immense value that the Cognitive Mind brings to the equation. On the other end of that annoying green terminal is a supercomputer that fills an entire building, capable of complex calculations and considering reams of information that your Operative Mind is incapable of tracking all at once. While your Operative Mind has the ability to focus and filter out all extraneous data, your Cognitive Mind considers everything you’ve ever known, and calculates at speeds that surpass your Operative Mind by a hundred-fold. That sounds like a bold, even ridiculous claim, but consider the following: have you ever been in a high priority situation, maybe you were in a large group at work, or a dangerous and unfamiliar situation arises suddenly in a public place, and while you’re thinking about what to do - maybe you are even starting to formulate a plan as to how to proceed - you suddenly just get the sense in your gut that what you were considering - possibly what you would normally do in this type of situation - was not the right call. Something just doesn’t “feel” right. People have referred to this as “the little voice inside you.” And if you’ve lived long enough, you’ve probably experienced both scenarios: a time when you ignored that little voice, and a time when you listened and did what it said. That “little voice” is your Cognitive Mind giving you an answer. It has processed all the data in the environment - every person’s facial expressions, who’s looking at whom, what their personal motivations are, who might be capable of subterfuge, who’s acting shifty or nervous or angry, what complicated, complex, and nuanced forces are at play, and has reached a conclusion as to what you should do in that situation to make the scene play out in the best possible way. Your Operative Mind would take days to sift through that same amount of information and, if you did devote that amount of time to investigation and pondering, you would most likely come up with the same answer that your cog mind did in seconds. That is the value of the Cognitive Mind, it is vastly superior in processing power and how many factors it can account for.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this arrangement, however, and likely the source for so much of the confusion and doublespeak about the Cognitive Mind, is that “you” as the Operative Mind do not get to see the process of how the cog mind reaches its conclusion. This is the limitation that your op mind and cog mind live with in their relationship to each other. Your op mind receives the answer with no explanation. You don’t even get a progress bar or any indication of how long it will be before the cog mind returns an answer to you. If you spend the time thinking about it, you can usually find clues that suggest some of the path that your cog mind took to reach its conclusion, but the cog mind doesn’t “show its work.” You get “what”, not “why.” It is not hard to imagine how general ignorance of that function or failure to account for it could lead to some erroneous conclusions about the Cognitive Mind, such as assuming that because it didn’t give you an answer right away that “sometimes it doesn’t work.” Or, say you get an answer a week or two later - long after you’ve forgotten that you even asked the question. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Universe just handed you the answer or that thoughts “just pop” into your head (with no cause or explanation). Or, because the answer the cog mind gives you sometimes disagrees with what the Operative Mind has concluded, you might give your op mind preference and just assume that the cog mind is wrong or unreliable. And since you can’t see the logic path that it followed to reach its conclusion, it’s easy to just dismiss it as nonsense.

It is also true that, as powerful and fast as your cog mind is as a computer, it is still a computer, and if you feed it bad data, it will produce bad results. The Cognitive Mind only knows whatever you as the Operative Mind type into that green console. It does not have access to perceive the outside world or to form its own opinions or judgements of what’s going on. It only knows what the op mind tells it. As a prime example, let’s say that you are up for promotion at work, but are in competition with Marta for the position. And maybe it’s a bit of a tight race, and maybe your Cognitive Mind has weighed all the office politics and the history of the past year, and has reached the conclusion that Marta is probably going to get the promotion. And maybe your Operative Mind isn’t at all happy about that. Maybe you desperately need the raise that comes with it due to some upcoming life changes. And maybe it occurs to you in passing that if you were to start spreading rumors about Marta around the office, that would probably be enough to push the promotion in your direction. Of course, you’re not that kind of person who would do that. But…..maybe you start rationalizing to yourself. Maybe you start telling yourself that Marta is actually devious or doesn’t have the company’s best interest at heart. Maybe you start finding fault with every little thing she does. Perhaps you start convincing yourself that Marta doesn’t actually deserve the promotion, and that you’d be doing the company a favor by “exposing” who she really is. (Eeesh, this is starting to feel uncomfortable, isn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there). The point of this story, though, is that your Cognitive Mind does not know that your Operative Mind is just telling a fiction to help it feel better. If you tell your Cognitive Mind that Marta is devious and is trying to torpedo the company, it will believe you. And over time, you will start feeling a growing sense of unease and distrust around Marta, thereby seemingly supporting your initial position. Because you fed your Cognitive Mind bad data, it is giving you bad conclusions.

As uncomfortable as this newfound awareness of your Cognizant Mind might be initially, there is untold value in learning the dance that your Operative Mind and Cognitive Mind perform together. So much of what seems unfathomable in our society, the irrational behavior of individual or large groups of people is almost always attributable to a misaligned Cognizant and Operative Mind. Either someone’s cog mind is being fed bad data and therefore giving a bad conclusion, which people are following, or someone’s Cognizant Mind and Operative Mind disagree with each other, and the whole person, being uninformed or untrained in how to reconcile these two pieces of themselves, doesn’t know how to react and effectively picks an option at random, or worse, defers to someone else around him that seems more confident, but perhaps doesn’t have the purest motives. In contrast, a person who knows the map and mechanics of their own mind, sees the inner workings, understands how the pieces move together can use that knowledge to prioritize his options and choose with confidence the one best suited to the future he wants to see.