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"Black Box" In Our Brain

Have you ever on circumstances which you don't know exactly what happen, but your brain / feeling just say that isn't right? How a businessman know that their new products will sell or not through their instinct? Or when you meet something that endanger you, your head suddenly give you signal to avoid that?


photo credit: Walt Disney concert hall - Los Angeles, United States - Black and white street photography via photopin (license)


On this post, let me share with you a real story of a fire fighter's experience in Cleveland.

He was received a routine call to take out fire in the back of one story house, in the kitchen. He and his team came in from the front door, laid the hose to the kitchen then sprayed water on it. But it was so strange, fire wasn't abated. Then they sprayed water again. Still, it was not make any difference. The team decided to retreat back to the living room and tried to figure out what happened and what should be done.

Suddenly, fire men commander's brain gave him signal that something wrong happened. He turned to his men, "Let's get out, NOW!". As the team just got out of the house, the floor on living room collapsed.

Wow, how can he did that? Does he have some kind of psychic power? Let's we continue the story.

Years after that incident. Commander is interviewed by decision making expert, Gary Klein. Apparently, when he was on living room, his ears (he always let the earflaps up, so he can sense how hot the fire is) felt that temperature was too hot there while fire was in the kitchen. And the fire was so quiet. It didn't make sense given how much heat there was. The truth is fire was centered underground beneath of living room. That was why very hot there.

At the time, commander wasn't knowing all of the facts, but he did make all of that connections unconciously. All of those processes happened in behind the locked door of his unconcious. "Black Box".

Until now, we humans still aren't fully understand how our brain work. Somehow, we understand some complicate things in a split second. Experts can see something which other people cannot see.

Our brain stores everything from our life, books we read, conversations we had, people we met, arts we enjoyed. Even when our concious brain side forget about them, but the "Black Box" or unconcious part of it still remembers and uses them as factors to process solutions on some triggers we give or received. It is very powerful and much much faster than our concious part.

Imagine if we can control that "Black Box", what can we do? Can we fly maybe? Or build a super robot which replaces our physical bodies? Who knows ☺.

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