How is the preconscious mind related to the brain?
Dr. Charles Limb is a surgeon, neuroscientist, and musician at the University of California, San Francisco who has carried out research on the neural basis of musical creativity. He has spent years observing brain activity with an fMRI scanner. This scanner registers increased and decreased activity in areas of the brain. He has focused his attention on monitoring jazz musicians and freestyle rappers as they improvise (make music and assemble words spontaneously) inside of one of these scanners. Here is what he found.
The frontal lobe of the brain is considered the seat of consciousness. However, there are subdivisions, the medial prefrontal cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex, which do very different things. The lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in self-reflection, introspection, and self-monitoring which would tend to inhibit an individual’s freedom because of a fear of mistakes, for example. Dr. Limb found that this part of the prefrontal cortex shuts down when the musicians and rappers start creating. At the same time he recorded that the medial prefrontal cortex suddenly lit up. This part of the brain is the center for self expression which sets you free to risk mistakes and not worry about what comes next.
This area of the brain is what I call the preconscious mind. It is that place where your body can both freely remember and freely express what it knows from a life time of interacting with the world around it. It speaks in its own unique way. Dr. Limb also found that “that when you’re doing a creative spontaneous task, the senses and motor (movement) regions of the brain are more active.” This part of the brain is wired especially well for telling your body story.
What has just been described above also matches Abraham Maslow’s peak/flow experience. He is the founder of the self actualization movement in psychology. He and his followers discovered that people who have achieved this self actualized life have a unique set of experiences when they are in this flow state. Their experiences include such elements as: control in flow, effortlessness, altered perception of time, melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experience. This is just one more window that allows us to view what happens in your preconscious mind.