busy brain

At home, you have such easy access to broadband internet which translates to a wide stream of media. Whether it be YouTube audiobooks or music to keep our brains busy 

We call it entertainment and indeed it is but the downside of that is it consumes mental cycles in our brain. While it does entertain our conscious brain on the subconscious side, it effectively eliminates the ability for our brain to process in the background 

I'm not a neuroscientist just trying to speak from what I notice in my own life, but it's impressive to see that part of the braid reawaking when I'm stuck driving for an hour or two without internet in my car is not able to stream music to me 

And don't get me wrong. I'm a passionate advocate for music. It taps into a deeper part of my soul that I can't access otherwise and makes you want to dance. Create smile, love, cry, deep core things to who I am as a human and that I want to maintain in my life 

But at the same time it pushes another input into our brain that requires processing. It requires that our subconscious be working all the time to handle this year. Volume of information we're throwing at it 

At first, the long stretches of driving without music are difficult. My conscious brain wants that entertainment feed. It wants something new to play with to keep itself busy. Perhaps to distract it 

But after a while maybe it's in the first 30 minutes. Maybe it's on day three of intermittent blocks of driving with no music or media input. But after that. The brain gets bored and starts to play with itself 

At first, it's silly things wondering about packing or the next meal or what someone said, but that's just the beginning of your subconscious reawaking and starting to process. It's long laundry list of things that it needs to work through. 

They dance summer between subconscious and conscious bubbling up in a seemingly random order as if bubbles popping out of the top of a violent mud pit in Yosemite Park 

On the surface they transition from subconscious to conscious and we have an opportunity to see what's happening 

To see what our brain has been working on. Worried about curious about frustrated by and all of that. 

The things that bubble up seem to be the things that your mind feels like we need to work on in the conscious world and it's kind of like a handoff where when those idea bubbles come up to the surface and pop, the conscious brain has the opportunity to assess it. Maybe it's a left brain right? Brain type of thing. I'm not totally sure, but some of my most creative ideas have come from moments. 

They're not random. It's something that you're subconscious has been processing and sometimes it's just something it needed to work through in the background to make sense of something, but even those have value in popping them up to your conscious brain and letting it realize as well that whatever it was trying to figure out why the dog pooped indoors or why your package didn't show up or maybe why you've been procrastinating paying that DMV. Bill, but whatever it is in my experience it can be worth taking that in your hand as if looking at a shiny new rock, turning it over and looking at it from a few different angles, then deciding what you want to do with it. 

Some of those gems go in my conscience to-do list like an idea for a new vehicle build or solution to a programming challenge I've been working on. While others I simply look at and toss back onto the ground, they were beautiful. I was glad to have seen them but it's not something I need to take with me or carry with me. 

It can be just that one off zany idea that's completely impractical or perhaps just makes you laugh. But it's neat. It's a part of you. It came from you. These are your ideas that your brain has been creating and working on 

Maybe there's a tie to the verbal nonverbal part of the brain. The subconscious is the nonverbal part of the brain where it's processing things in the background in ideas on a more primal level. Perhaps an emotional level as well, but it figures things out and pops them up to the conscious. What I'll call the verbal layer of the brain where we can then kind of see the idea, take shape out of the mist and put words to it.