Summary

Neuroscience often equates speed of response with depth of understanding. This article clarifies why timing data describes initiation, not lived experience, and why confusing the two creates gaps between science, mind, and meaning.

Theme: milliseconds vs seconds vs lived experience

Core ideas:

Unconscious initiation (ms) vs subconscious access (seconds) vs conscious narration
Why fast ≠ meaningful
Why response timing is not experience
The layered cascade model (initiation → embodiment → cognition)

Sections

Summary
Orientation
Framing Neuroception and Neuroscience Definitions
What Neuroscience can Measure
Subconscious Processing
Reframing A Mind-based Framework
Conclusion
Practices that Honor Understanding
Wisdom to Go

Orientation

This measurement does not happen solely in the brain, but across the nervous system as a whole.

Exploring Polyvagal Theory (PVT), developed by Dr. Stephen W. Porges, required understanding how neuroscience defines subconscious, unconscious, and conscious processing. What followed was a deeper inquiry into the structure and language of neuroscience itself. From a spiritual perspective, this bridge is not obvious, and across this article series, we will untangle why science, spirituality, and socio-political environments often struggle to coexist.

This is not a deep dive into Polyvagal Theory. That framework simply brought us here.
This is an exploration of what is required to apply neuroscience meaningfully, without mistaking measurement for total reality.

This is also not biohacking.

If you are looking for shortcuts or optimization strategies, you are in the wrong place. There is no need to hack what is inherently yours. Sustainable regulation emerges from understanding, not from forcing, overriding, or exploiting biological systems.

Hack — to break into; a person misrepresenting who they are or what they can provide
Bio — life

Hacking is not the foundation of sustainable authentic being.

Framing: Neuroception and Neuroscience Definitions

Within Polyvagal Theory, neuroception is described as the nervous system’s unconscious detection of safety or threat, “constantly discerning risk without involving thinking parts of the brain.“

Because my work focuses on the mind as a whole, consciousness at large, and individual conscious, subconscious, and unconscious areas of the mind, this definition initially felt imprecise. My engineering mind finds discomfort in incomplete solutions, so the deeper question:

What does neuroscience actually mean when it uses the terms conscious, subconscious (preconscious), and unconscious?

Neuroscience defines these categories as follows:

Conscious
Awareness, meaning-making, symbolic interpretation, language.

Subconscious / Preconscious
No current awareness, but content can be recalled or verbalized. Involves cortical and limbic processing. Slower than reflexive circuits.

Unconscious
No access to language or imagery, no symbolic content, reflexive processing only. Occurs in milliseconds.

What Neuroscience Can Measure

Neuroscience supports the unconscious category through timing data:

Autonomic shifts (heart rate, pupil dilation) occur within 50–150 milliseconds
Conscious awareness begins to emerge around 300–500 milliseconds
Language formation and narrative explanation take longer still

This means the body responds before language exists to describe the response. The brain is still organizing meaning while the nervous system has already shifted state.

(Diagram: timing cascade — initiation → embodiment → cognition)

The autonomic nervous system, responsible for breathing, blood flow, and survival regulation, operates as the body’s autopilot. These processes are associated with structures such as:

Brainstem nuclei
Periaqueductal gray (PAG)
Hypothalamus
Reticular activating system (RAS)

These regions are assumed to generate no thought, no memory, and no symbolic representation.

You respond to your environment before you understand or verbalize why.

Supporting Evidence for Unconscious Processing

Unconscious processing is supported through observations involving:

Cortical damage
Individuals with cortical injury still demonstrate startle responses, vagal shifts, and freeze reactions.
Anesthesia
Threat responses persist even when conscious awareness is suspended.
Infants
Nervous systems respond before language or symbolic cognition exists.

In neuroscience terms, neuroception is defined as detection without awareness, interpretation, or cognition. It occurs too quickly for thought and without cortical involvement.

Subconscious Processing

Subconscious processes:

Can be recalled
Can be verbalized
Can be influenced by thought and imagery

They are associated with:

Amygdala–hippocampal loops
Insula
Medial prefrontal cortex

Neuroscience describes where and when processing occurs in the body by measuring neural and autonomic activity.

What it does not measure is the mind itself, or the organizing intelligence behind experience.

The piece missing is the mind and the bridge to get there.

Reframing: A Mind-Based Framework

In a mind-based model:

Consciousness
Awareness, agency, problem-solving, and integration of lived experience.
Subconsciousness
Embodied, emotional, memory-linked felt experience. This layer gives rise to symbolic meaning, for example, why a rose signifies love.
Unconsciousness
Suppressed or unintegrated experiential memory. Operates through archetypal tones and symbolic emergence, not narrative recall.

All three layers are expressions of you. How information is processed depends on history, memory, and internal organization.

Neuroscience-based systems explain how and where information is processed.
Mind-based systems explain how experience is organized, stored, and accessed.

This distinction is incomplete; neuroscience appears to equate unconscious processing with “not mind.” In practice, what it actually means is:

Non-symbolic, non-narrative, non-representational processing at the point of initiation.

Conclusion

The brain and the mind overlap, but they are not identical. Understanding their intersection requires linguistic precision and epistemic humility.

Neither framework is wrong. Each observes experience from a different dimension.

The next article explores why modern neuroscience relies on “non-” language, and how defining reality by negation shapes what we believe exists and what we dismiss.

Practices that Honor Understanding

Sovereign Rayne works with the mind as a tool, engaging practices that honor natural structures, cycles, and intelligences that support healing, stability, and meaningful living.

Learn the right tool for the job.
Then become proficient at it.

Access an overview of LUMYST, the teaching platform of Sovereign Rayne.

Explore workshops and offerings.