Human Thought Structure: How Minds React Before They Even Know

From a neurological point of view, human consciousness is extremely hard to study. 

Luckily, from a cold reading perspective, you only need to understand the normal sequence of events that happen during the human thought process.

Everyone has the “I” consciousness. This is our self-awareness. 

We take in data using our five senses and use that data to analyze what is going on around us. We then react according to this analysis. All of this can happen extremely quickly of course. Like moving your hand if you touch something hot.

You feel an itch, you decide to scratch it, then you scratch it. 

That’s how it goes, right? 

Wrong!

Many experiments have shown that what really happens is this:

There is an itch, you start moving your hand to scratch it (subconsciously), and then you consciously become aware of the itch.

Most of the time your conscious awareness is only made aware of something after you make some kind of action. That means your consciousness is not the decider, but actually the watcher.

Hindsight bias occurs when recalling the past affects our memories. Our memories are very fickle and hindsight bias is extremely common. 

We tend to remember things in a way that makes ourselves more of a central role in the sequence of events. 

This is one of the reasons cold reading works. We can suggest things to people about themselves, positive things, and in the future they remember them as their own ideas which we had intuited about them. 

They don’t remember it as us guessing, because that would diminish the positive things we said about them.