The Impact of Passive Information Processing

by Tim Brunson, PhD

In the late 18th century the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich von Schiller said that "It is the union of the unconscious and reflection that makes the poetic artist." That one phrase revolutionized how humanity viewed conscious awareness. He introduced the idea that in addition to our conscious awareness that there was another level that was actively working in the background. While he was merely a philosopher – rather than a scientist – his concept of a below-the-awareness consciousness quickly seeped into the lexicon of the rational researcher as an a priori assumption of the existence of an unconscious mind, which is a term often interchangeable with the idea of a subconscious mind. Nevertheless, while few doubt its existence, few have substantially explored its functioning and how it perceives and processes external perception.

One such researcher is Norman F. Dixon, PhD, of the University College, in London. He has conducted extensive research into how our mind passively processes perception. He concluded that our senses allow our mind and body to rapidly accept and adapt to both internal and external entities and events. Accelerated learning advocates, such as Paul R. Scheele, MA, of Learning Strategies Corporation in Minnesota, have applied Dixon's work to a variety of self-development programs, many of which tend to claim accomplishments that quickly receive the attention of skeptics. Regardless, the preconscious processing concepts proposed by Dixon and adopted by Scheele are based upon the premise that our neurophysiology is capable of perceiving and processing millions of bits of information each and every second. They claim that respecting this natural human ability allows learning to occur much more rapidly than in occasions when a subject should limit learning to their much slower aggregate conscious awareness, which tends to be retarded or throttled by a miniscule ability to processes information.

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