The Case of the Missing Goal:
Do you always know what your goal is?
Check out this really trivial example.
You walk into a room and stop. You realize that you have no idea what you came for. You could start to worry about losing your memory. But you know that most other people admit to the same experience.
Fortunately, you know what to do next. You walk back to where you came from and go back to doing what you were doing. You remember, for example, that you were about to cut something and saw no scissors. Then you remembered that pair of scissors in the other room.
For the return match, you give your memory better cues. Depending on your preferred brain modules, you may say to yourself "Scissors." Or you call up an image of the scissors as you recall where they were in the other room. Either way, you know your goal when you go to the room again.
You have just demonstrated, with no particular surprise, that part of your brain can have a goal without telling other parts about it.
This multiprocessing is normal and efficient. Your language channel was probably busy listening to TV or talking. Your visual channel was watching your work. The back channel that keeps track of where your things are can usually handle routine jobs by itself. If the scissors had been in a nearby drawer, that back channel would have had your hand reach for it without bothering the rest of your brain.
This example was trivial because you knew the right tool to cure this kind of problem. You go back to where you were. See the same signals you saw before. (Psychologists say "Recreate the stimulus environment." Pompous makes advice more impressive.)
But you don't do the same thing you did before.
If you always do what you've always done,
you’ll always get what you've always got.
When you realize what your goal was, you take care to call on other modules of your brain, particularly modules that don't depend as much on the immediate cues.
What you've demonstrated is that you can use a tool to help one part of your brain explain its goal to other modules. Mainly by arranging for the right cues.
People already know this.
And sometimes they do it.
The Goal of Goals
Goals
If you expect your brain to help you, decide what you want it to do.
Strengths people use to find goals
Goal Setter, Good
Imagery, Good
Imaginative
Planner, Good