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Noble Mind

An Exploration of Human Nature.

Consciousness, Intellect, and our Mind.

Chapter 4 A Deep Dive

In this chapter

Now we come to describing the main model in more detail. I introduce the basic logic of the model and present diagrams that show how different human characteristics can work together.
You will be able to recognise how each part of the model describes something that you experience, to a greater or lesser degree.
An example or two may help you explore how this applies to all of us.

Every Focus is Explored: A Framework for Human Nature.

So far, I have presented a very basic outline of The Hemispheric Intelligence (H I) Mind Model. At its core, each 'Focus' provides an evolutionary step forward in terms of the abilities of our ancestors to survive in new ways. These advances are still with us and define the behaviours that we may understand as “human nature”.
In this chapter, I will present greater details of our Subconscious and the Focuses along with their varied characteristics.
Please remember, everything presented in this book can be thought of as a work in progress. All that I present here is at an early stage of development and exploration. It is propositional rather than theoretical and will require considerable input from other people, collaborators. Research is needed, and input from theorists as well as practitioners, academics, and experts of all kinds.

The H I Mind: Subconscious.

Our Subconscious is not a Focus in the H I Mind Model but is included here as it is a vital component of our mind as a whole and supports all the activities of the neocortex based Focuses.
The Subconscious (also called non-conscious, unconscious, hormonal, spinal/vagal, body-based, etc.) is based in the oldest parts of our brain and is a very complex and often misunderstood part of our mind. It is responsible for reflex reactions, generating and maintaining habits, following routines, producing emotional feelings, and storing simple responses to certain situations. The Subconscious provides the primary connection between our body-based senses, our immune system, our gut, our hormonal communications, and the main Focuses.
The Subconscious provides a base on which the rest of our mind has been built.
We are not directly aware of the workings of the Subconscious but we can be very aware of the feelings and urges produced by it. I contend that, like a complex computer, the Subconscious is basically automatic.
The Subconscious is almost entirely attending to the ‘here and now’. It records past events (ranging from specific traumas to learned skills and generalised experiences) and responds to what is going on in the 'now' but has little, if any, interest in the future.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Subconscious:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Relatively instant The current moment/situation Self-interest only.

Long-term effects (habits, traumas, fears,..) can be very beneficial but can also be judged as disorders in modern times.

Reactive, with very little planning.

Challenging, though not impossible, to address problems.

Memory-based.

Acts primarily through primary emotions.

Typical emotions include desires, fear, anger, pain, pleasure, discomfort.

The H I Mind: The Social Focus

Our Social Focus handles inter-personal behaviour within an extended family group or troupe. Provides basic abilities to cooperate and to be able to engage in a variety of give and take relationships.
Attentive memory allows individuals to gain knowledge from other members of the troupe.
Basic social behaviours allow an extended family to survive and support one-another in various ways. This requires a personal awareness of social relationships, behavioural pecking-orders, troupe objectives, and subtle non-verbal communications. Memory-based learning is essential, though the learning is not restricted to specific memories.
The Social Focus is primarily interested in the current moment.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Social Focus:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Fast Interested primarily in present moment. Learned responses/behaviours.

Individual relationships developed over time.

Adaptable.

Group play reinforces mutual protection and troupe behaviour.

Focus on self and family/tribe.

Typical associated emotions include love, caring, companionship, belonging, and shared pleasure. Also includes trauma-based fear and hate.

The H I Mind: The Aspirational Focus

The Aspirational Focus is paired with the Social Focus but provides open-minded creativity and extended motivations concerned with the future. This is the essential playful, adventurous, competitive source that allows us to learn as children and aspire as adults.
In order to enable creativity, this Focus has to become intuitive and transcends the limitations of rational thinking. Creativity involves thinking outside of the logical box.
To describe this in more experiential terms, I propose that our Aspirational Focus is a part of ourselves that is never quite at rest. That part of ourselves that has a mission in life, though we don't often actually know what that mission is. That part of ourselves that wakes us up in the middle of the night and nudges us with an idea that is just out of reach; a meaning with little expression. That part of us that seeks unknown goals and influences our choices through intuition and feeling. And, importantly, that part of ourselves that can nudge us into novel behaviours at almost any moment (a vital part of humour and experimentation).
Our Aspirational Focus is not directly available to our conscious awareness and yet it can influence our every thought. Our Aspirational Focus points us toward long-term purposes for ourselves, to provide us with creative alternatives, and to provide potentials for personal fulfilment. The purpose of the Aspirational Focus is to guide us in ways that we do not normally understand at a logical level towards a future that supports us to grow as an individual.
Our Aspirational Focus gives us humour, art, music, invention, pastimes, creative skills, and more advanced versions of the playfulness associated with the Social Focus.
Our Aspirational Focus can also appear as a certainty about our vocation or a restlessness that drives us towards the extraordinary.
Our Aspirational Focus can give us 'genius' or, more often, an ability for an ordinary person to achieve the extraordinary that is within them.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Aspirational Focus:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Very slow Interested in distant-future, distant-horizons, and potential benefits still to be discovered.

Imaginative focus = seeking distant potential.

Provides creative potential which can be expressed in many ways.

Very adaptable.

Acts through intuition.

Easily swamped by other faster Focuses. Becomes more important when other focuses are less active.

Provides life-purposes, vocations, and drives to engage with life in general.

Typical associated emotions include hope, aspiration, wellbeing, anticipation, inspiration, and excitement.

We may be aware of the influence of our Aspirational Focus as intuitions and urges that disrupt our normal behaviour. These intuitions rarely come with an explanation and are likely to appear at odds with any carefully thought-through logic that we may have. Our Aspirational Focus offers us, through these intuitions and urges, an alternative course of action that is aimed at achieving a bigger life-purpose.
Intuition and urging can also come from the Subconscious, of course, but the Subconscious is mainly concerned with life in the moment. Our Subconscious reacts to the current situation and alerts us to signals that we may have missed consciously or patterns of behaviour and habits that have become automatic.
There is a significant chance of confusing automatic activity with creative activity and a lot of spiritual teaching fails to identify or highlight the differences. Listening-in to body feelings, to emotional urgings, and to quiet thoughts is at the heart of meditational/mindfulness practice as well as deeper psychological therapies, cathartic work, and body work in general.
If the Aspirational Focus is to be identified independently of the other parts of our mind then it is important to recognise that the Aspirational Focus is creatively future-focussed rather than reactive (as is the case with our Subconscious and our Social/Cultural Focuses). Our Aspirational Focus is less interested in personal pleasure or benefit. Also, the feelings that come from our Aspirational Focus are, in my experience, more likely to seem to come from beyond the confines of our present circumstance.
Some people are able to naturally listen in to their own Aspirational Focus without consciously trying and, if they are able to trust their own 'inner voice', these people can naturally and easily find a path through life without much in the way of doubt or regret. Such people, rightly or wrongly, exude larger-than-life confidence and we may be drawn to them charismatically or we may find these people to be able to offer some natural wisdoms.
Some people get the feeling of disquiet from their Aspirational Focus but struggle with the discomfort as a sense of wrongness. Perhaps this is made worse as we do not have a well-defined cultural understanding of our own mental processes. Such people may represent the 'Tortured Soul'.
Some people seem deaf to their Aspirational Focus and live their lives for selfish pleasures or just follow the 'rules' of society. These people may be simple quiet-souled folk, but some become lost souls.
Most of us seem to have an intermittent appreciation of something going on within us and work hard to find a path for ourselves that makes sense. We have our victories and our insights, our moments of achievement, and we also have our temptations and frustrations, our times of turmoil and grief.

The H I Mind: The Cultural Focus

Symbolic language capabilities allow for extended social behaviour that, in turn, enables the creation of long-lived cultures.
This Focus relies on increasing levels of awareness to learn the details of the culture that we are born into.
This Focus allows us to work in increasingly sophisticated ways within family, troupe, and wider populations.
The extended social-learning combines with symbolic language and improved conscious awareness to allow us to get on within bigger populations and create long-lived cultures that can exploit a diverse range of environments.
A general-purpose language ability also enables the learning of cultural rules, truths, expectations, and so on. This, in turn, enables increasingly sophisticated education to be provided to the majority of the population.
The Cultural Focus is still largely based in the here and now but extends this into projections about potential social interactions and complex projects.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Cultural Focus:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Relatively fast Interested primarily in social safety and shared enterprises.

Learned responses/behaviours.

Sophisticated behaviour.

Adaptable.

Provides language.

Focus on relationships, peer-group(s), and status.

Manages shared core-beliefs, customs, cultural-norms, and how we fit into society as individuals.

Typical associated emotions include ambition, superiority, friendship, envy, jealousy, companionship, belonging.

The H I Mind: The Noble Focus

The Noble Focus is paired with the Cultural Focus and inspires our highest motivations. This allows for motivations that are not ego-based and that go beyond our survival-based sense of self.
The Noble Focus gives us such things as awe, wonder, connectedness with broad concepts of life and the universe, a sense of morality, wisdom, and even unconditional love.
Our Noble Focus gives us our 'highest' motivations, to respect and honour all life, to experience unconditional love, to accept and forgive even when our sense of self appears to be under threat, to be prepared to suffer and sacrifice for others, and to be able to consider every life as having value.
Our Noble Focus provides, I suggest, a deep sense of connectedness with others and life in general. Our Noble Focus provides our larger-life purposes, our most significant aspirations, our altruism, our morality, and a focus on life beyond our self.
This Focus also provides emotions such as awe, wonder, deep gratitude, and connectedness to life in general. At times, our Noble Focus can give us a sense of size beyond our normal body.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Noble Focus:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Unknown, possibly very slow unless representing learned wisdoms Interested in benefits for all life, and probably not at all for individual self.

Cooperative focus = altruistic/non-Ego.

Provides extended creative potential, perhaps based on thoughts, concepts, themes that extend knowledge.

Enigmatic.

Acts through intuition.

Ethereal: easily swamped by other 'Focuses'.

Provides ideas/concepts and information that can seem to have significance that is undeniable, sometimes defying easy description, or hard to relate to our other motivations.

Typical emotions that may be present or triggered can include wonder, awe, confusion, connection/belonging beyond direct relationships including unconditional love, being deeply touched, and appreciation of beauty.

The Noble Focus is not, so far as any of us are aware, an easily measured or verified thing. I have heard some descriptions of non-ego states of mind that might imply the Aspirational Focus and the Noble Focus to be associated with activity in the right brain hemisphere.
The reason that I include the Noble Focus in addition to the Aspirational Focus in this model is because it seems to me to represent a logical evolutionary development by adding motivations that focus beyond self-interest.
The Noble Focus could, I suggest, work in two main ways: to influence our motivations to work for the better survival of life in general and perhaps to provide shared non-conscious cultural/social knowledge in support of our individual progress.
Our Noble Focus can also give us a sense of expansiveness: a feeling of connection to life beyond our physical self. A feeling of spirituality/continuum/etc that is a necessary alternative to our logical thinking and our seemingly body-based feelings provided by our more mundane Focuses. Our Noble Focus has big ideas to communicate that contribute to our life-long growth of personal wisdom.
Our Noble Focus influences the development of our character (that part of our personality that grows beyond our genetic predispositions) and is a vital element of personal growth.
Where the Aspirational Focus gives us motivations to identify more complex things to 'do', the Noble Focus gives us ways to 'be' that protect and support life in general and contribute to human life beyond our own more-selfish interests.
One final comment on the Noble Focus is that some faiths and research describe a super-conscious mind, or a soul, or a spirit. The H I Mind Model offers no suggestions about extra-sensory or non-brain-based processes, but the Noble Focus seems to provide at least some of the descriptions sometimes associated with a Soul.

The H I Mind: The Planning Focus (Including our Core Conscious Mind)

The Planning Focus manages the varied inputs from the other focuses. The core of our conscious awareness gives the Planning Focus the ability to reason through sensory and imagined observations and plan for our own benefit.
This allows us to solve problems, reason our own motivations out, and plan logically to suit the specific situations that we are presented with.
The Core Conscious Mind, contained within our Planning Focus, is what many people think of as our reasoning consciousness. I believe that it is actually the arbiter of the inputs of our other focuses of mind and is considerably more variable and less logical than we tend to imagine.
The slow-processing of the Planning Focus gives us the abilities to problem-solve, to explore alternative tactics, and to plan more comprehensively and further into the future. This is the part of our mind that we think of as being logical and able to chain ideas together. This is the part of our mind where thought-led motivations come from, for example determination, choosing, strongly-focussed awareness (concentration), and willpower.
The Planning Focus is mainly aimed at the near future, to identify risks and possibilities and problem-solve. The Planning Focus can literally control, or override, other mind functions, with enough willpower and determination, at least for a time.
This table summarises the typical speed of processing, the functional attention, and some basic characteristics of our Planning Focus:
Speed Interest Characteristics
Slow Interested in problem-solving.

Attempts to plan for the best future.

Can express need for efficiency, or pragmatism, or balance between the other Focuses.

Very adaptable.

Heavily dependent on conscious thought and reasoning.

Acts through thoughts but can generate some emotions.

The 'problems' tackled by the Planning Focus will often be concerned with cultural status and maintaining an individual 'place' in society. Typical emotions include interest, determination, curiosity, anxiety, general-arousal.
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