The subconscious is a powerful force that shapes our behavior and reactions without us even being aware of it. It is defined as the reactions and actions we perform without conscious thought or awareness. The unconscious is the deep recesses of our past and memories, and it prepares us for whatever action we decide to take before we consciously experience the intention to do anything. Psychologists and psychiatrists have a much narrower view of the capacities of the unconscious than that represented by the New Age description.
Fears or desires that motivate a person, but of which that person is not directly aware, are also subconscious. For example, a negative feeling you have towards a type of food could be the result of food poisoning caused by it when you were a child and that you have already forgotten about. In the New Age community, techniques such as autosuggestion and affirmations are believed to harness the power of the subconscious to influence a person's life and real-world outcomes, including curing diseases. The idea of the subconscious as a powerful or powerful agency has allowed the term to occupy a prominent place in New Age and self-help literature, in which researching or controlling your supposed knowledge or power is considered advantageous.
A recent psychological study showed how irrelevant signals shape learning and suggested that the effect of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious thoughts can be modeled by varying the presentation time of emotional faces. In his book “The Gift of Fear”, author Gavin de Becker writes about how an individual's subconscious can process information and make him act out of fear, without the individual fully understanding why he acts that way. Just like a submarine travels underwater, something that is subconscious exists beneath normal consciousness. Scientists are still trying to define the exact processing pathways for concepts as small and subtle as subconscious thinking. But one thing is certain: our unconscious seems to govern all the actions we perform.
