Everyone knows the posts that say “you are now aware of your blinking/breathing/swallowing/etc.” and you are aware you are handling these functions manually. What is the process for the body to switch those back to a more automated state where we aren’t consciously aware of them again?
In: Biology
I have an impression that our mind is always automatizing stuff we are doing (like constantly support our body functions).
This change depends on how many stuff we are doing, when we stop everything else and focus on our breathing, our brain stop making connections about other things (making this things automatically).
Talking about the process, this change has to be related to the energy animals spend being alive. Breathing is a thing that our brain knows very well how to do, so we don’t need to be aware of our breathing. When we focus in something else, our brain stop our “awarenesses” of breathing.
In another words, doing things is taking the situation in front of us and relate to things that we already experienced (you can call memories), when we do something a lot (like breathing) our brain can do this process without “learning again” every time we do it. And when we are about to learn something new (or doing something that we have less knowledge/experience about) our brain stop to be aware of what it already knows very well how to do and focus completely in the new information, doing a biological process of sinapses to don’t react on the breathing for example (but the concepts of how the sinapses interact to all those informations are too dense for this explanation)
For a lot of essential processes like breathing, the automatic control is in the brain stem (the primitive, or lower function, part of the brain). But consciousness arises in the cortex (the more modern, complex, higher function part of the brain. The cortex can override the brain stem when needed, and control the muscles needed for breathing by itself. Also, both the higher and lower parts of the brain can control what you are paying attention to. So, you can at times be consciously aware of your breathing, and/or control how you’re breathing. The different areas interact back and forth subconsciously. Depending on which areas “win” will determine whether you are breathing automatically or consciously.
The crazy thing is that the subconscious controls most if not all of our actions, to the point that consciousness might be an illusion. Like, different parts of your subconscious might fight about how to breathe until you start breathing deeply and slowly. But, after you start breathing like that, your subconscious tricks your conscious mind into thinking it had come up with that idea in one clean though all on its own.
Latest Answers