What Your Mind Is Trying to Tell You - Using Your Brain For Business

Thought comes in many shapes and forms. Each of our individual thoughts is part of a system of general thoughts or abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are nothing more than the product of our thinking. Abstract thoughts do not have a personal meaning or relevance to our lives. Yet, abstract thoughts have the power to influence our actions and decisions.


When thinking about thoughts, it helps to distinguish between personal and collective unconscious thinking. Personal thoughts pertain to what you believe about yourself, your world, and other people. Collective unconscious thoughts are those that result from cultural patterns, organizational structures, and social mores.

Collective unconscious thoughts arise from the same basic set of instructions handed down to us by our ancestors. This information includes the basic beliefs about ourselves and our world that we've inherited from our parents and our cultural heritage. These beliefs about ourselves and our world aren't contradictory; they're parallel. However, because human beings are social creatures with complex and conflicting motivations, these beliefs sometimes conflict with each other and create mental obstacles that lead to thought problems and anxiety.

Our human brain consists of billions of neurons that link together via our trillions of synapses. Neurons communicate with one another through electrical and chemical signals that travel through the brain's synapses. In fact, these signals are so dense that our brains couldn't process them all if they took all day to pass through the entire network. Because of this, human brains function in strange ways: some thoughts are instantly processed while others are not. Even though every thought takes a tiny bit of time to pass through the network, when multiple thoughts race through at the same time, it can cause the brain's processing centers to overload and send the message "stop thinking that stupid idea!"

One fascinating piece of research in the field of cognitive psychology suggests that our brains have evolved to help us think strategically. If you were wondering how this could relate to your business, you'll be happy to know that one of the most effective ways to think is to intentionally stop thinking! You may be familiar with the "cognitive biases" described above. For instance, our tendency to believe that people who gamble are dangerous and untrustworthy is extremely powerful; we use these cognitive biases all the time in our every-day lives.

The goal here isn't to understand how thinking works; it's to understand why you should be thinking more deliberately. There is a long list of potential benefits to consciously thinking: increased creativity, improved learning, improved mental health, enhanced productivity and more. When you think strategically, you aren't thinking through an ocean of potential distractions. Instead, you're focused on things that are directly related to your goals.

Here's an example. An angry person thinks about hitting someone, then he goes out and hits someone. This person's neurons will fire in all the directions, sending an angry electrical signal all the way across his entire brain. The more angry the person is, the more neurons fire, until he actually strikes his attacker! This kind of extreme attention to detail is what our human brain uses for all sorts of thought experiments.


However, if you're using this kind of extreme attention to detail, you're probably thinking along the lines of "alright, but how do I get this angry person's brain to fire when I direct it towards my opponent?" This is where the importance of having good analogies or metaphors enters the picture. A simple game like the Mental Cash Crunch involves a simple box, a stack of cards, and a simple board. But the mental image of all the possible ways that one can flip over the stack of cards to make a "human cash crunch" is infinitely more complex than the actual mental image (the metaphor) of the stacks of cards.