The premise that most mental processes go on prior to awareness - and may never reach awareness at all - has now come into widespread acceptance among cognitive scientists.
Semantic memory filters experience so that those messages that reach awareness are primarily those that have pertinence to current mental activity.
Visual selective attention is the process by which we tune ourselves to the world so that, of the millions of bits per second transmitted by the retina, the information that is most important to us reaches awareness and directs action.
The brain predicts the outcome of a decision even before the decision reaches awareness and humans' (illusionary) consciousness seems like an after-effect of a set of unconscious cognitive processes leading to the action [1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
In fact, it can take several seconds for something that is in theory perfectly visible to reach awareness (unless you close one eye to cut out the flashing squares, then you can see the 'suppressed' image immediately).
Some people say compassion for all, to reach awareness towards an infinite number of beings, seems vague and abstract -- understandable -- consider cultivating focused attention in a benevolent manner towards any beings that come into your field of awareness.
In a world that provides an abundance of visual information our brain seemingly effortlessly decides which information reaches awareness.
In addition, information that fails to reach awareness still appears to guide our behavior and affect processing of the stimuli that we are aware of [10].
Finally, there is evidence that the degree to which information resulting from subcortical processing modulates emotional responses, and reaches awareness, depends on the level of concurrent cortical processing.
Alternatively, threat cues could be processed automatically (LeDoux, 1996) and consequently place less demand on processing resources in order to reach awareness.
The crucial role of top-down signals in determining whether information impinging on the senses reaches awareness is dramatically illustrated by the phenomenon of inattentional blindness.
