Comment on Have any of you experienced that "snake detection" instinct? Do you think it's real?
Up_dog@lemmy.world 4 days agoExactly. It’s like hiking down a path and you’re admiring the scenery but it’s quiet. No birds. Nothing. Your subconscious picks up on that and you feel that “intuition”. Something isn’t right. There’s a predator around.
Miller@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That part of your mind that is consciousness is regarded by the rest of the brain as quite a simple thing I think. The information it receives in terms of vision for example needs to be carefully cartooned for it, your consciousness, that part of your brain you regard as yourself needs to be told only about clouds and blue sky and a rabbit jumping in green grass. What the subconscious mind actually receives from the eye is 120 million electrical dot point signals many times a second carrying information like light intensity up small amount spectral shift large left. It has to piece all that together to give a good guess at what might be happening outside the skull, marry it with the information coming from the other eye to suggest the third dimension, compare it to what the information was in the previous millisecond dataset to infer action and blend that all into signals from the other senses and a general running model of what is likely to be there and dumb that down and send rabbits and clouds to the conscious mind. Sometimes in all of this vague threats are detected and monitored but the conscious mind is not explicitly informed so it doesn’t get upset. The subconscious mind is doing this while also managing a virtual infinity of internal bodily system signals also requiring constant response.