A poker player needs to have a good understanding of how both his conscious and subconscious mind work. The subconscious mind still has a bad reputation gleaned from intellectual history. Freud's discoveries are almost impossible to ignore. Thanks to him, the term "unconscious" has become associated with concepts such as repression, ulterior motives, passion for family members, fear of castration, and a host of other pseudoscientific sensations. Although modern psychology has dismissed many of Freud's findings as scientifically dubious, the definition of the unconscious mind that he proposed is nevertheless very real and relevant, albeit in a different way than the one he imagined.
We all know that defining consciousness is difficult, but that doesn't mean we should get lost in the maze of language and philosophy. Let's simply say that consciousness is the part of the mind that you are consciously aware of and can directly control. The subconscious is the part of the mind that you are mostly not consciously aware of and have no direct control over. It controls your automatic processes, actions, and thoughts.
Most people completely misunderstand how their minds work. Actually, maybe that's a good thing, the details of cognition don't affect their daily lives. But as a poker player, for you, your mind is the main interface between you and the game. Your mind is also the main obstacle to progress. It is very important that you come to terms with its idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, and get to know them more deeply.
The first important point about the mind is that it is not continuous. It is incomparable, made up of different parts, distributed not only in space but also in certain patterns. Consciousness and its constructs constitute only one element among many others in the mind.
There are many classic psychological experiments demonstrating the split mind. 
For example, once upon a time, severing the cortical connection, the bridge, between the two hemispheres of the brain was used to treat intractable epilepsy (and is still rarely done). When the researchers observed the surviving subjects, they found very dramatic changes. When these "split-brain" patients were shown a picture for the left eye only, the patient could not tell what was being shown, because the image seen by the left eye is processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, while the control centre for speech is in the left hemisphere. The separation of the cerebral cortex severed the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that patients could only recognise, but could no longer name what they saw. When asked to pick up and manipulate an object, the subjects did so easily. They could hold the object perfectly, but if it was in the left visual field, they could not name it. If the object was in the right field, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, they could name it perfectly.
Another example is about blindness with residual sight. Blindness with residual vision is a rare neurological disorder caused by damage to the visual cortex. People with residual vision believe they are blind. They claim to have no conscious experience of sight. However, when shown an object in their field of vision and asked to guess its location or direction of movement, even though they insisted that they could not see, they would point in an unbelievably correct direction. This is an astonishing discovery. He says that the link between their consciousness and their visual apparatus is cut, but their subconscious mind is still processing and receiving visual information. Patients with this disorder are also able to freely grasp and manipulate objects that they claim not to see.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. While most experiments on the human brain are not possible (it would be unethical), there is a wealth of information on the architecture of the mind that has been gathered through random experiments. Over so many years of observation and experimentation, we have records of almost every conceivable brain lesion. Scientists have seen how damage to one part of the brain or another affects a patient's behaviour, and have discovered many observations about the brain
functioning and modality.
For example, aphasia is an impairment of speech. Broca's aphasia is a condition in which the subject understands the meaning of individual words, but is unable to form and comprehend a sentence. It results from damage to a very specific brain module. There is also Vernix aphasia, in which the patient can speak perfectly well but has no understanding of what other people are saying or writing. These disorders show how narrowly
certain areas of the brain can be specialised, even in such complex subjects,
as a language.
The more we learn about the brain, the more we realise how fragmented it is.
Evolutionary biology sheds even more light on this by showing how our brains evolved from reptiles and neo-humans to modern humans. The neo-cortex, the place where our consciousness, cognition and rationality "sit", is the latest addition to the brain's structure. But most of our movements, behaviour and other functions are regulated by older, unconscious mind structures. Consciousness is new. For the mammals from which man evolved, it is very possible that consciousness was just a by-product, playing a small role in their brain processes, unlike us Homo sapiens.
So what is consciousness? Consciousness is a newly emerged ability in our mammalian brain. Located in our neo-cortex, it continuously synthesises our perceptual sensations, emotions, memory and cognition into a continuous experience. This is what consciousness is.
And of course, consciousness is an effective carrier of light signals from the outer world. But why should you conclude that it can also play an equally important role in your inner world? Why should we conclude that consciousness is designed to perceive the vast unconscious waters in our minds. In fact, the small part of the mind that remains outside the subconscious is filtered through its own concepts and frameworks. From an evolutionary point of view, nothing more is needed. While consciousness is trying to process its own part, the rest of the brain is involved in the complex neuronal activity that helps to sustain life and other functions.
Another important statement about the mind is that consciousness does not have access to all parts of the mind. And it's not because you made a mistake. It's just the way our brains are designed.
We feel that our conscious self must be who we are. Our conscious experiences are first of all "discussed" in our neo-cortex. And our mind is made up of many more elements than just the conscious part. And thus, from a broader perspective, we are much more than our consciousness.
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