According to Joe Vitale … your conscious mind is aware of only 15 bits of information while there are 15 million bits happening each time. According to Martha Beck the verbal region processes about forty bits of information per second. The nonverbal processes about 11 million bits per second. Martha Beck favors wordlessness naturally. Vitale and Beck use different statistics to describe how inadequate the conscious mind is.

On many occasions I experience this inadequacy while i work on my daily crossword puzzles. When I get stuck and can’t gt the answer I usually do something else. When I do something I don’t like, like housework, I get frustrated and the cloudiness of my mind worsens. When I relax and especially when I go to sleep I usually get answers I previously could not access. Sometimes I get answers while eating something I like.

This is a far cry from the tiring process of studying during my college years especially when a lot of memory work was involved. There was no time to relax. I felt I needed all the answers immediately. Had I known the information from Vitale and Beck, I would have loved school life more. Needless to say many years ago school life was simpler. There was no college thesis then much less APA rules to give students nightmares. There were no cellphones to be checked every so often. There were no computers either. It was an age where there were fixed answers for every question asked in the classroom. I managed to have some fun in school even under a regime of authoritarian discipline. Our fun was a whole lot of silliness by the standards of the youth of today.