ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to make people, the everyday mind user, more familiar with the mysteries of their own mental life, and once in a while – to tell something that they did not already know. It intends to act as an introduction to the discussion of errors and violations. There’s nothing quite like the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ (TOT) state to expose the subtleties of knowing and not knowing the things that go on in our own mind. This TOT experience shows that one of the main problems with the human mind is that the user is only in direct conscious contact with a fraction of the whole. The conscious part seems to be located somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes. The extent to which our current actions are governed either directly by conscious attention or more remotely by pre-programmed habit patterns gives rise to three levels of performance: knowledge-based, rule-based and skill-based.
