I became aware or the elephant-and-rider metaphor a while ago, perhaps due to one of your posts. Since that time, I have attempted to take advantage of the insight by considering what else it could mean.
For example, the rider can “see farther” but the elephant perhaps can “see more clearly what is nearby.”. By this I mean only that feelings which have no obvious explanations often come from flashes of intuition about people, ideas or situations which your conscious mind would have never noticed.
In other words, the unconscious mind seems to be the seat of our various pattern matching algorithms, which leads us to make logical errors at times, but may also lead us to infer things about the motives or mental states of other humans or give us a “gut feeling” that some situation is unsafe, when the conscious mind would otherwise have blissfully ignored the danger.
This isn’t really in contradiction to what you just wrote; the main idea is that half of training the elephant may be listening to the elephant.
“gut feeling” that some situation is unsafe, when the conscious mind would otherwise have blissfully ignored the danger.
I think of my conscious mind as being useful in areas that I’m focusing on and paying attention to, and almost useless in everywhere that I’m not.
My subconscious and automatic responses, on the other hand, seems to be much better at dealing with things that I’m not noticing (like breathing, keeping my feet moving in a reasonable manner, etc). However, I don’t know enough neuroscience to know if my subconscious actually focuses on some things and not others.
The biggest insight I think most people can take away from the metaphor is that it is ok to train themselves. Often people are overly optimistic in their ability to use their “will power” to change or stop a behavior at any moment they wish. “I can stop smoking any time I want,” “I will eat this treat now but I will exercise latter,” and etc. Often, the more productive method is to use type 2 process to train your elephant so less “will power” is required.
I became aware or the elephant-and-rider metaphor a while ago, perhaps due to one of your posts. Since that time, I have attempted to take advantage of the insight by considering what else it could mean.
For example, the rider can “see farther” but the elephant perhaps can “see more clearly what is nearby.”. By this I mean only that feelings which have no obvious explanations often come from flashes of intuition about people, ideas or situations which your conscious mind would have never noticed.
In other words, the unconscious mind seems to be the seat of our various pattern matching algorithms, which leads us to make logical errors at times, but may also lead us to infer things about the motives or mental states of other humans or give us a “gut feeling” that some situation is unsafe, when the conscious mind would otherwise have blissfully ignored the danger.
This isn’t really in contradiction to what you just wrote; the main idea is that half of training the elephant may be listening to the elephant.
I think of my conscious mind as being useful in areas that I’m focusing on and paying attention to, and almost useless in everywhere that I’m not.
My subconscious and automatic responses, on the other hand, seems to be much better at dealing with things that I’m not noticing (like breathing, keeping my feet moving in a reasonable manner, etc). However, I don’t know enough neuroscience to know if my subconscious actually focuses on some things and not others.
The biggest insight I think most people can take away from the metaphor is that it is ok to train themselves. Often people are overly optimistic in their ability to use their “will power” to change or stop a behavior at any moment they wish. “I can stop smoking any time I want,” “I will eat this treat now but I will exercise latter,” and etc. Often, the more productive method is to use type 2 process to train your elephant so less “will power” is required.
This makes me wonder if my experiences with actual horseriding is useful for managing my own brain. It feels quite plausible that it might be so.