Is Reality Different Than It Seems?
Sunday, June 28, 2009 22:18Right now there is more information coming in from all your senses than you could ever possibly keep conscious track of. As it turns out, you don’t have to – your pre-conscious mind has mental filters that limit what actually gets through to your conscious brain.
At any given moment, your brain is receiving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bits of information through a lot sensory inputs. Most are evaluated and acted upon automatically.
The nerves in your body fire continuously. But not all of the messages are relayed to your conscious awareness.you can focus your attention on any given part of your body, say the your right knee, and get information on how it feels. However until you focus your awareness on it you probably were not conscious at all of the messages your nerves were sending.
That’s an example of how this pre-conscious filtering works.
Another example is what we notice in the world around us. Here’s what I mean. I used to drive a silver Camry. I don’t have that car anymore, but I always notice ones that are just like it while I’m driving.
All the others cars on the road fade into the general category of “cars” but the preconscious mind continually screens the incoming information for something that might be important to me. When it sees a car like my old Intrepid, it brings it to my conscious awareness.
It’s clear that our mental filters determine what we’re able to perceive in the world around us.
Can someone else may be driving down the same road I am noticing blue Fords well I only see silver Camrys of a specific year. That means that two people in the same environment would have a completely different experience of “reality”. The differences in how each individual’s mental filters are set.
I think it’s easy to see how the quality of your mental filters affects the quality of your life.
Since these mental filters are so important, you’d think most people would pay more attention to how they’re formed and what they are. But they don’t.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can take control and set your filters in a way to support you and help you lead the quality of life you want.
I’ve found a site that will help you do that: www.JFMcCaffreyMD
Dr McCaffrey has a lot of articles on all aspects ofvital living – mental, physical and emotional. you can read a bit more about mental filters at: How Real Is Your Reality?
I think you’ll also enjoy the page: Improve Your Worldview – A Modest Proposal to tell you an easy way to eliminate one the most damaging influences on our mental filters.
When you’re at the site, be sure to sign up to get the free special The Surprising Power of the Heart. it’s information I haven’t seen any place else. Among other things, it tells you how much more influence messages from the heart have on the brain than the other way around. Be sure to check it out.
