Wow, I haven’t thought about that in forever

Just by thinking about things regularly, a large store of unconsciously accumulated knowledge gets unlocked in your brain.

Cognitive scientists call this priming, where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. This shows that past experiences can influence current behavior and cognition, even if one cannot consciously recall those experiences. Ask anyone who writes for a living.

The unseen wellspring is a very real thing. Putting words on paper is merely the final step in a longer process. It’s merely the artifact of something bigger. The writer’s true job is to be a miner of memories, digging through the layers of their unconscious mind to unearth nuggets of gold.

Each sentence they craft is a path leading them deeper into the forest of their mind.

I experience this on a daily basis. It’s always exciting, and sometimes terrifying, when the shadows of forgotten experiences and hidden knowledge pop up like lotto balls lining up in their chute, coming to rest and into focus.

Things that happened to me ten, twenty, thirty years ago, that I haven’t thought about since they happened, suddenly present themselves.

The mere act of thinking activated the unseen wellspring. A lifetime of experiences and information lay dormant, waiting to be awakened by the act of composition.

It’s like my mentor used to say, your mind knows more than you do.

How does priming play a role in your work? What unlocks your store of unconsciously accumulated knowledge?

Playing trivia is a typical venue where this phenomenon plays out. Have you ever been sitting at a bar with your friends, working as a team to answer questions, only to discover you knew some random fact about nasa’s lunar excursion module?

Wait, what? Where the hell did that come from?

That’s priming. Everyone can leverage it for greater creativity, productivity and fulfillment.