I purchased some juice and items in a small store to survive the four day journey to Toronto. On the return walk, I felt a little ill-at-ease as there were many vagrant types that appeared to have all their possessions in large plastic bags of the type used in wheely-bins. Some vagrants seemed a bit ‘out of it’ and others seemed to be talking to themselves. I held my wheeled luggage tighter as I felt ‘ill at ease’ and somewhat vulnerable in this strange city. I mention this due to the ‘ill at ease’ feeling.

The task is to understand our feelings. I commonly to say to others: “Enjoy the feeling.” When people discussed their fears, whether it be talking in front of others or racing a motorcycle, my advice was to ‘Enjoy the fear’. What I meant was that the person should monitor how the ‘feeling’ affected them so they could counter the effects in the future. The task was to observe the influence over the body and mind so that the fear had less influence over our thinking and decision-making. It appears that when we get a strong feeling of any type, it dominates our thinking to the detriment of our decision making ability. To be more accurate, feelings created by our subconscious may dominate or paralyze our neocortex. Logical thought may be suspended. We may be unable to choose the best action in a situation. This reminds me of a sentence I copied into my notes from a book years ago with source unknown:

“We still have prevalently animal brains and mindset. The sooner you realize it, the sooner things start making perfect sense.”

The hint here is that in a fear or ‘ill at ease’ situation, the very useful animal response may dominate. Our more modern neocortex may be paralysed. We clearly do not want pilots who ‘freak out’ or get mentally paralyzed when a motor explodes. We need pilots that can remain calm under duress and fly an aeroplane with only half its engines. We don’t want them ‘praying to God’ for the three hundred souls on board. We need practical, ‘get the job done’ persons that can handle the practical realities of the situation. I give this example so that we can all monitor and control our anxieties and fear in times of trouble. It is not just exploding engines that cause disfunction and paralysis in our neocortex. Standing in front of a crowd to give a wedding speech or saying: “Hello” to a stranger can cause mental paralysis. I state that it is thus necessary to monitor what the reptile brain is doing so that we can use logical thought to handle situations. As the quote above suggests: “The sooner you realize (that we have an animal mindset), the sooner things start making perfect sense.” Like the Ford Transit van whose running gear came from the Ford Cortina parts bins, your neocortex comes from the monkey parts bin and your subconscious comes from the reptile parts bin. Neither is perfect. The two do not know how to talk with each other. Of the two the neocortex is the most problematic. Expect the brain to play up on you occasionally. Expect neocortex problems and learn to deal with them. You should be able to use both your brains more effectively. When trying to write a chapter like this, I recognize that my brain is my work tool. I need it to do what I want it to do. I must make it perform in the fashion that I require. It must produce suitable sentences. I just dropped the mouse and it split in two. I joked that it was very helpful that gravity sent it downwards rather than upwards. Imagine life without gravity! The mouse happily clicked back together. In earlier days, the mouse had a tail and was easier to find. One day at a client’s premises, a government department ‘quango’, a mouse came flying through a door in front of me. The excellent Logitech mouse had run out of battery and the operator taught it how to fly!

However, we have to use logic in sensible measure. If we allow logic to be the total influence behind our reaction to situations, we will miss out on most of the joy available in the situation. So, monitor your subconscious, but don’t dismiss it’s influence over your body. When talking to someone, the words will come out naturally, which will then enable you to monitor the smiles and enjoy the reaction and enjoyment the recipient is getting from your interaction. To explain better, I do not know what words are going to come out of my mouth until a moment after they have been spoken by my mouth. I can leave the talking to that part of my brain responsible for talking and at the same time monitor what signals the recipient is giving me through their smile and can also somewhat detect what smile messages that my face is giving. I cannot consciously control what smile messages my face is giving but I can create an internal ambience such that my face can transmit clearly. I can also create peace in my mind so that I can subconsciously detect the messages they are sending through their face. Although this is commonly called body language, it is almost entirely the minor movements of the numerous muscles on the front surface of our face. We spend an inordinate amount of time studying peoples faces! Whilst explaining things, I think of it as painting a picture in a persons mind to pass the information.

Whilst monitoring these subconscious reactions whilst conversing with a person, you may detect ‘an ill at ease’ situation. You will need to break this ill-at-ease tension with a non-standard ‘ice breaker’ such as an honest comment about their dress sense. Girls are good at this with their “You have an interesting smile.” I invent these on the spot. If you pre-plan your words, the situation gets awkward and appears to lack a genuineness. I don’t work out what I am going to say to persons until I say it. A young sporty type male was waiting for a bus in the station patiently playing on his phone. He had an extremely long bag, about which I blurted out a comment. He keenly told me all about his planned snowboard adventure this Christmas holidays in Canada. I gave him full lead in the communication and facially demonstrated that I was interested his sporting pursuits. Less time was spent telling him about my current round-the-world-by-train activity. On parting, he gave me a respectful nod as the over-zealous bus conductor called the group to attention. The bus conductor was exuding a commanding voice that demonstrated that she was ‘not to be messed with’ and ‘everything had to be done her way’. Teachers often exude such manner of talking. I rejected her authority in my mind as she was standing next to a row of ticket windows. There was a sign in one window saying: ‘This booth is now closed. Please use the next booth.’ However, each booth had the same sign! Hopefully, this is being read by somebody that would jokingly point this illogic to any authority figure. I remember an situation forty years ago in Canada at a bus station. It convinced me that Canadians are not very bright. there was a man telling those waiting how to queue to buy a ticket. I said to him: “If you were serving in that empty ticket window, there would be no queue!” A similar comment to a train conductor on an Amtrack train thirty years ago nearly got me kicked off the train in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, I had earlier had an interesting chat with the chief conductor. When he came to investigate the conductor’s complaint against me, he said: “Oh! It’s you.” She had asked me to sit in my assigned seat in a mostly empty carriage. I had questioned the need when the view was better from this seat and the carriage was mostly empty. My questioning her command apparently qualified as ‘rudeness’ of a magnitude sufficient to justify further action. Common decency seems to disappear as Christianity is destroyed.

It is now 0140 at night, and my mind is fully active. When writing this type of work I need a mind that is free from interruption and free from distractive thoughts. I often call it a ‘non-interruptive environment’. In a work situation, it can be useful to ignore emails and messages until midday if suitable. The eSim that I bought for Canada has failed and we are out of telephone communication somewhere in western Canada. All there is here is pine trees and snow. The non-interruptive environment applies also to the brain. If you have other thoughts on your mind, it is difficult to think about the content of the written matter. What I am noticing is that my fingers are typing as I mouth the words, but I know not what words will come next! I look out of the window into the darkness for a while then the fingers start hitting keys, but my brain is thinking the words in a sort of slow motion. This slow motion has to be trained as the fingers cannot keep up with the speed of the brain operation. I also find it is better to keep typing and ignore spelling and bad wording as they heavily interrupt the thinking process. So again, I have to play tricks on my brain to get it to function in the manner I desire. The neocortex inability to think about more than one thing at a time also influenced this. If I go back a few sentences and start to correct errors, I will lose the train of thought. I will also try to elaborate on items previously written which damages the original thought train. We do use some strange expressions such as ‘thought train’. This is a need to control the influence of the subconscious for the benefit of thinking. Avoid stifling the subconscious. Give your feelings a place in a guarded manner. Magnifying or restrict the influence of your feelings as necessary. This is close to impossible because we have little control over our very busy subconscious, but we can modify how it influences the neocortex. I am suspicious that the limbic system is a translation area that allows the feelings generated by the reptile brain be detected by the neocortex. We are going round a curve and I can see the pair of locos with their very bright headlamps lighting up the track between the trees. I am feeling sleepy again and have just yawned a few times. I fell asleep exceptionally early this evening at about nine o’clock. I tried to stay awake until midnight but failed. I had two broken night’s sleep with two overnight flights Bangkok to Tokyo and Tokyo to Vancouver. Such is the nature of sleep. I say: “God created night so that we would sleep. Some clown invented electric lights, and now we stay up all night. Numerous persons on this carriage are playing games on computers when nature says that they should be sleeping! I’ll shut this lid and see if I can get some of that strange stuff called sleep.

Much as I try, I can’t puzzle which part of my brain goes to sleep, although clearly much of my brain keeps functioning. I still breath at the appropriate rate. My intestine keeps pumping food along the canal. Noise and strange activity may cause me to wake.

Let us consider the operation our two main brains. Our neocortex uses logic. When we are thinking, we effectively talk to ourselves inside our brain. We can thus deduce that our language is important for us as it does more than allow us to communicate with others. Be careful here. Our smiles allow us to connect. Our language allows us to communicate using logic. I am pondering what happens in a child’s mind until they have been taught language. They certainly manage to communicate with their smiles, frowns, and grimaces. As adults, we can do the same. We can scream with pain and make a large number of facial expressions. I also wonder how much communication humans had before we invented language approximately seventy thousand years ago.

Try to work out what is happening in your neocortex right now. Perhaps pause a moment and look around and monitor what thoughts come to mind as your eyes focus on the items around you. From my dinner car seat, I can see snow. My brain contemplates its nature and feel. It remembers its coldness. It recalls snow fights with my brother Steve. It remembers toboggans. It remembers snow cuttings made by trains with a snow plough. My brain runs through a rumble of memories about snow. Now my eyes are roaming the art-deco fittings in this ancient but beautiful carriage.

Ponder this next quote:

“Whereas logic is the language of the conscious mind, emotion is the language of the unconscious mind. We know that emotions are reactions to perceived and imagined stimuli, not based on logic, but on one’s own personal experiences. Emotions often outweigh our logic.” – Rules of Persuasion, westsidetoastmasters.com

Let us take that quote in smaller doses.

• “Logic is the language of the conscious mind.” The neocortex operates using language and logic. The language I use is English. Interestingly, the language one learns as a child may influence the way we use logic in our mind. A Frenchman may think differently to an Chinese person. French has more romance in its language. French uses the twenty-six characters of the alphabet which was a very clever way of making an endless variety of words. The Irish have many more words describing the weather. They can be more expressive than an English speaker. Chinese uses single characters for words. One would expect less variety of descriptions of weather and a greater tendency towards yes and no answers. Irrespective, our thinking is influenced by our language and its use to handle logic. We use logic to compare Volkswagen to Toyota but we may buy a Jeep for emotional reasons.
• “Emotion is the language of the unconscious mind.” We bought a Jeep for emotional reasons. The resident singer on the Trans-Canadian created better emotional atmosphere in the carriage as she sang with an ‘appreciative’ smile. I detected that she appreciated having an audience. She was getting a joy out of us purposefully entering and sitting to listen. To understand your subconscious mind, you need to recognize that it is operating at nine times the capacity of the neocortex and that it is receiving inputs from every action around and is generating emotions for each activity. Somebody just dropped something in the tiny carriage kitchen and I detected a minor emotion from the event but consciously ignored the emotion or rather ignored the feeling created by the emotion.
• “We know that emotions are reactions to perceived and imagined stimuli.” Somebody states the same as I state. Every activity around me creates an emotion. Some of these emotions are tiny and ignored like the stacking of the cups in the kitchen right now. The statement is more encompassing than mine. The author states that emotions are reactions. So each action causes a reaction in the form of an emotion. The author states the emotions are caused by stimuli. This is more encompassing than my ‘actions’. The emotions large and small are caused by any stimuli to any input to any sense. I certainly know that the emotion when a female walks past is entirely different to the emotion when a male walks past. So touch, sound, light all create emotions.
• emotions “not based on logic”. You will find that fun, joy, and happiness have nothing to do with logic. Logic often has to be abandoned to enjoy activities. I was a mathematician and trained as an engineer in London. I was very logical. But I also puzzled out that fun, joy, and happiness had nothing to do with logic. Logic had to be abandoned to enjoy myself. I did not switch off logic. I let it run idle in the background so that stupidity could be arrested.
• “Emotions often outweigh our logic.” I am trying to loose weight but there is a half eaten bar of chocolate next to me! My passion for chocolate outweighed my logic. Decisions are not always made on logic but on emotions. In years gone by, the female might rely on the males logic in decision making. The male voice says: “We can go to France for a holiday, but we are not going into debt so we are staying in a caravan park.”