Note: This blog is an extension of my book Second Chance and emphasizes the Reticular Activating System (RAS) as the brain’s “gatekeeper” between the conscious and subconscious mind, incorporating practical applications for personal development, mindset shifts, goal achievement, and overcoming mental blind spots (scotomas). It draws from neuroscience while tying into the two minds, RAS programming via repetition + emotion + present tense, and real-life transformation stories from in the book “Second Chance” by Bill Scott
Once acted upon by the Conscious mind, 99% of the data we receive hangs around for a short while in time periods ranging from moments to hours, and then evaporates as if it never existed. The remaining 1% takes the RAS exit to apply for permanent memory status in the Subconscious mind.
You can think of the RAS as the guy who peeks through the door at a speakeasy, or the guard that forces you to stop when you attempt to drive into a government facility. If the guard recognizes you, he or she cheerfully ushers you in. If not, he or she turns you away.
“But if the RAS keeps everything out it doesn’t recognize, then how do we learn anything new?”
If you want to know the answer to that, then you’ve come to the right place. It’s what the book “Second Chance” focuses on. You don’t need a book to grasp one of the most essential skills every child should learn in elementary school—before almost anything else. Taking control of the reticular activating system is every bit as foundational as eating the right foods and getting proper exercise while growing up. Neurologist and educator Dr. Judy Willis has long emphasized that the RAS acts as the brain’s gatekeeper of attention: understanding how it filters information is critical for helping children focus, stay engaged, and truly learn.
If I have peaked your interests, read on.
How Understanding and Programming the RAS Can Transform Your Awareness, Goals, and Destiny
Introduction: In Second Chance, I shared my 1977 epiphany —walking out of rehab and
later, boarding a flight to California, as the ultimate proof that change is possible. At the
heart of that transformation, and the practical philosophy I developed over decades, lies a
remarkable part of the brain: the Reticular Activating System, or simply the RAS.
Often called the brain’s gatekeeper, the RAS filters the overwhelming flood of sensory
information bombarding us every second—millions of bits —allowing only what aligns with our conscious intentions and subconscious programming to reach awareness. It’s why, after buying a new car, you suddenly notice the same model everywhere, even the identical color. Or why focusing on gratitude reveals opportunities you previously overlooked.
This isn’t woo-woo; it’s a product of 50 years of personal research with its basis grounded in
neuroscience meeting practical mindset work. Why it isn’t common knowledge, why it is not taught in elementary schools astounds me. It is practical knowledge based on research conducted by hundreds of scientists and philosophers for centuries.
We attempt to shove a plethora of knowledge into young minds and give no consideration as to how they will remember it and use it in their lives. It took me 34 years to discover it myself, merely by accident, and if I had known about it in my formative years, at least I would have had a excuse for the virtual mess I made of the first 34 years of my life.
The RAS connects your conscious goals with your subconscious powerhouse, acting as the bridge I describe between the two minds. If you aren’t familiar with how it works, you suffer from a handicap that limits you as surely as blindness affects your ability to see the world around you.
How many times have you hung your head and thought, “Why didn’t I see that coming?” or “Why am I so unlucky?” or “Why can’t I get a break?” Or my favorite, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I would have no luck at all?” Yeah, it’s really that sad.
But it’s not your fault! So, stop blaming yourselves. You’ve been short-changed by an educational system that thinks you are better off with documented, hard facts that come out of textbooks approved by the state, while other countries like China and Japan are running rings around America by encouraging their children to THINK.
If your life has been guided by nothing but documented, safe facts, you’ve been denied a rich and fulfilling life, and it’s no wonder our prisons and mental institutions are filled with confused and sick individuals who know nothing but RULES that other people claiming to be smarter than they are have forced them to follow. “Step on a crack, and break your mother’s back!” Yeah, I would say it’s almost that bad.
By understanding and deliberately programming your subconscious, which in-turn trains your RAS to welcome and affect out-of-date inaccurate information, you can overcome psychological scotomas (those mental blind spots), activate the Reticular Activating System for success, and create the life you desire. One more thing before you go. This is fun stuff! There is no pain here. Only gain. And once you’ve learned the secret, you’ll get off your phone and do something enormously beneficial with your life. If you want to know more, keep reading.
Section 1: What Is the RAS?
First the necessary scientific stuff: The RAS is a network of neurons in the brainstem’s reticular formation—a “little net” (from Latin reticulum) of tangled cells spanning the medulla, pons, and midbrain. It’s about the size of your little finger, roughly two inches long, yet it punches way above its weight.
Key components include:
- Ascending projections to the thalamus, hypothalamus, and cortex.
- Neurotransmitter systems: cholinergic (acetylcholine for arousal), noradrenergic (norepinephrine from locus coeruleus for attention), serotonergic, etc.
Don’t fret if you don’t understand these scientific terms. They are only here to entertain the nerds who might be reading this.
Brainstem Cross-Section
The reticular activating system (RAS): a narrative review of discovery, evolving understanding, and relevance to current formulations of brain death | Canadian Journal of Anesthesia/Journal canadien d’anesthésie | Springer Nature Link
Billions of bits of information assault our five senses of touch, hearing, tasting, seeing and smelling every waking second of every day.
Think of information as a flood of water coming towards you in a tsunami. Without some type of method to regulate its flow, you would be crushed by its weight and drowned within seconds.
For example: Your mind doesn’t see a tree. What it sees is billions of bits of information that come at you at the speed of light (700 Million Miles per hour— Source: Wikipedia) and reduces it down to something the human mind can understand. Couple this with the next tree and the next, and your spouse telling you to come and eat your dinner before it gets cold; if your conscious doesn’t shut down once a day to rest long term, you could not function.
The RAS regulates arousal, wakefulness, sleep-wake cycles, and selective attention. Without it, we’d be overwhelmed or unconscious.
For an overall picture: Information received and reassembled by the conscious mind is acted upon in the present tense, taking care of business of the utmost importance. The conscious mind has no access the past or the future, and it’s ability to store information is pitifully small. 99% is lost within a few minutes, while some may last a bit longer, but its function is not one of memory, it’s one of process. Once the tiny amount of pertinent information presented is acted upon, it is sent on its way to be dumped. But, before it is dumped, it passes by the RAS and attempts to gain entrance to win permanent storage there.
Now please don’t take this process literally. I built the story to help you understand it in a way a five year-old can grasp its meaning. Please don’t be offended. This approach merely saves me a bunch of writing and you a bunch of reading.
THE RAS IN ACTION
Data that meets the subconscious mind’s criteria is immediately collected and stored there. Every experience you have ever had—possibly even those from before birth—may exist somewhere in the subconscious. Under the right circumstances, one of those memories or impressions can surface involuntarily and either make or disrupt your day. Unfamiliar information is usually rejected unless it carries powerful emotion or appears repeatedly within a short period (i.e. Studying for an important exam). Once it enters the subconscious, it may strengthen or weaken similar information already stored there, or it may create a new association. The importance of the information depends on its weight: the strength of the emotion attached to it and the frequency with which it is repeated.
For example, I was born in Louisiana and love authentic Louisiana gumbo, but I rarely order it. I’ve had the real thing, and most versions don’t come close to the best there is. If I lived somewhere that prepared it properly, I’d order it often. But since I don’t, I usually wait until I’m near a place known for making it right. After enough time passes, I may forget about gumbo altogether until the right opportunity reappears. If I see it on a menu in Chicago, I don’t even consider ordering it.
This is important because it deals with why we make choices whether we are talking about Louisiana gumbo or investing in the stock market.
Once embedded in the subconscious, these stored ideas go a long way toward ruling our lives. I use the word “ruling” because these ideas appear without thought. For example, “My friend Paul does not eat brown vegetables because he is colorblind.” No amount of persuasion can convince Paul that lettuce is not brown, but he will devour a baked potato in an instant.
Section 2:
How the RAS Works as a Filter and Gatekeeper
The RAS acts like a sophisticated bouncer at the door of consciousness. It shifts sensory input, prioritizing what’s relevant based on your beliefs, goals, and emotional state. This prevents overload while highlighting opportunities or threats.
Manifestation and the Reticular Activating System: The Neuroscience of Filtering Reality
In personal development terms, this ties directly to programming the subconscious. Set clear intentions (present tense, emotional charge, repetition), and the RAS tunes your perception to notice supportive resources—people, ideas, coincidences. This is the mechanism behind the “law of attraction” explained scientifically.
Section 3: RAS in Daily Life, Goals, and Mindset
Examples: Learning a new word and hearing it everywhere; focusing on health and spotting gym deals or recipes. For bigger goals, like rebuilding after addiction (my story), the RAS amplifies evidence of progress.
Practical keys from Second Chance:
- Clarity + Emotion + Repetition: Affirmations in present tense (“I am focused and successful”).
- Daily visualization to “set the intent.”
- Overcoming scotomas by questioning limiting beliefs.
Exercises: Morning intention-setting, gratitude lists to rewire filters.
Section 4: Science of Sleep, Arousal, and Performance
The RAS modulates EEG patterns for wakefulness vs. sleep. Damage or dysfunction links to disorders like coma, ADHD, or insomnia. Healthy RAS supports focus and resilience.
Section 5: Programming Your RAS for a Second Chance
Steps: Define goals clearly, use affirmations, track “RAS hits,” act consistently. Emotional intensity strengthens the filter.
The RAS is your built-in ally for transformation. Master it, and every day becomes a Second Chance.
In the framework of Second Chance (Conscious versus Subconscious minds, the RAS as gatekeeper, psychological scotomas and the programing keys, repetition + emotion + present tense), this time-perception difference is central to why affirmations, visualization, and emotional rehearsal are so effective.
How The Subconscious Perceives Time
The subconscious lives almost entirely in the “now.” The subconscious doesn’t have a strong linear sense of past, present and future like the conscious mind does. It treats vivid memories, current experiences, and imagined futures with similar emotional and neurological weight. A traumatic event from decades ago can feel as immediate and real as something happening today if it’s emotionally charged.
Maybe you have experienced moments like this; maybe you haven’t. But sooner or later, they come. A smell, an unfamiliar word, a situation, or a song on the radio can suddenly launch an unexpected feeling—happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety, or something else entirely. You may have no idea where it came from or what triggered it. The feeling may pass before you can think about it, or it may affect the rest of your day. These emotional charges sit in the subconscious like hidden land mines, and when something sets one off, you can only hope to manage it— even if it happens at the worst possible moment, like trying to land a jet carrying 400 passengers. Most of these experiences come and go almost unnoticed, but they are real, and they can still cause trouble when least expected.
The subconscious is both a transmitter and a receiver. You may find it difficult to control its output, but you can definitely control its input, because everything absorbed by the subconscious MUST pass through the RAS, no exceptions. A vividly imagined positive outcome (in the present tense, loaded with feeling) gets processed as if it’s already happening or has happened.
This is why old limiting beliefs, fears or habits persist so strongly … they are stored as current :truths” in the subconscious database.
** IMPORTANT ** Refrain from thinking, “I wish”, “I want”, etc. because the subconscious is isolated and knows only the present, and if you “wish you were rich”, your subconscious will work really hard to keep you wishing which means, you will remain poor.
“But if I go around saying, ‘I am a billionaire’, people will laugh at me.”
Probably, but your subconscious will believe you and will do whatever it needs to do to insure it becomes reality.”
If you want an explanation of why this is true, one of the purposes of the human mind is to attempt to maintain sanity, and other than a medical condition that gets in the way, you cannot believe and disbelieve the same thing at the same time, else you would go insane. You might like half of what a person does and dislike the other half, but you can’t like and dislike the same thing.
It explains the power of present-tense programming and the fruitless attempts at wishing: Phrases like “I am confident” or “I handle challenges with ease”, bypass the conscious mind’s skepticism and install directly because the subconscious doesn’t argue about timelines. It accepts the emotional signal and starts aligning the RAS to notice supporting evidence in the real world.
This ties directly into my book’s emphasis on the two minds and the RAS filtering reality based on what’s emotionally programmed as “important” or “true”. The subconscious doesn’t debate, “Is this realistic for the future?”… It just reinforces whatever is strong emotional repetition attached to it right now.
BREAKDOWN
Information first floods into the conscious mind. Emergencies trigger instant action— “Oops! I’m on fire!” — bypassing deeper analysis. Day-to-day data (reading, speaking, routine thinking) gets prioritized by immediate necessity. Most input receives little thought and is quickly discarded: seconds for the trivial, hours or days for moderately useful items.
Only then does surviving information approach the Reticular Activating System. Here, the RAS acts as the gatekeeper, sorting and attempting to match it against existing subconscious data. Powerful emotion can force immediate passage. Unrecognized or neutral information often requires repeated submissions—through focused attention, affirmations, or visualization—until the RAS recognizes its relevance and allows entry.
Once admitted, the data integrates into the subconscious with its attached emotion, available for future reference. Though the subconscious might seem to have limited storage, the brain is engineered to prioritize what we repeatedly emphasize with feeling. This is where real transformation happens…
