'Don’t Believe Every Thing You Think', a popular phrase at the moment. I would add to this by saying, 'Don’t Believe Everything You Feel' and certainly, 'Don’t Believe Everything You Think You See'.

The first phrase I suspect many of us can agree with, even if it is only that Other People should not believe what they think. But thinking, even our own, when it is doing its best possible job is based on logic. Logic is one of the most amazing tools we humans have at our disposal; in fact systems of logic are what have made our modern technologically advanced world possible. This being said logic has one very strong limitation; it is only as accurate as our model of the world. Since none of us have all the information possible about anything, and I would even argue that since the advent of Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principal (with certain pairs of information not being knowable) it actually goes against the basic laws of physics to know everything about anything. This should not be reduced to a belief that we can in fact not know anything, there is much that we can and do know, even in day to day non academic ways. But ultimately, since we cannot know everything our model of the world will be incomplete and the logical conclusions drawn from our model will at best be an approximation. So “Don’t believe everything you think”, but also don’t dismiss this remarkable tool you have at your disposal.

 

The second phrase may also make sense but is perhaps a little more challenging. Emotions are an incredibly useful tool. They are a hardwired response to situations that cause an immediate or prolonged call to action depending on the needs of the situation. One of the most well-known of these is the “Fight, Flight or Freeze” mechanism. This is a threat response that is a part of our physiology. When we perceive a threat we automatically, most often subconsciously, assess the situation and if the threat is strong enough we will respond in a preprogrammed way, often without our conscious mind even knowing what has happened. Thinking takes time, emotions and our responses to them are often immediate. This can be a good thing, as with the “Fight, Flight or Freeze” example if we appear strongly threatened, we will jump to instant action to protect ourselves; if we had to think about it, often even as little as a second or two, the damage may be done before we know it. Of course we don’t act upon every emotion we have; when our brains are awash in the chemicals of that emotion, formulating a proper and metered response can at times be very challenging. For instance when our boss talks to us in a way that ‘feels’ like they are threatening our job, and therefore us, giving into the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” response may not be advisable. No matter what the situation, the response of our emotions can only be based on the information that is coming into to us. Just as with logic, at times we can know enough, but we can never know everything. Even our emotional responses can be based on bad information.

If both our thinking and our emotional responses are at best based on incomplete information, I think it may be important to ask the question, “How do we gain this information?” We can gain information about the world by talking to others, reading about various happenings and by just coming into contact with what is happening in our immediate vicinity. But how does this information actually get into our brains? At a fundamental level we take in this information in through our senses: Sight, Hearing, Smell, Touch and Taste.

We already know that our senses have limitations; we can only take in certain wave lengths of light and sound, what happens outside of the limits of our senses is lost to us without rather specific tools. Evan taste, touch and smell have explicit focuses and could not possibly register everything that is happening. Still with the limitations on our senses, a truly vast amount of data is coming in at any given moment, more than our conscious minds are able to deal with. This overload of input forces us to filter out some of what is coming at us. Just as there are limitations to our senses there are also holes in what we perceive, but our minds are constantly filling the gaps to render these holes unnoticed. This incoming data combined with our two fold need to filter out some sensations and adding others in to fill in the gaps, is the process of:

Perception (noun)
per-cep-tion [per-sep-shuhn]
psychology Any neurological process of acquiring and mentally interpreting information from the senses

This brings us to the third phrase, “Don’t Believe Everything you Think you See”. One thing that we seem to be hardwired to not notice is how much of an active process perception actually is. Each of us is constantly (unconsciously) participating in the creation of our own perceptions. We do not perceive the world as it actually is. The best we can often hope for is to observe the world as it has been USEFUL to see it in the past, the way we EXPECT to see it in the moment. Although it feels like it, perception is not a process we play a passive role in, each of us is constantly blocking out and filling in the content of our perceptions to conform to the way we already expect to see the world around us.

From moment to moment we are blocking out what we don’t expect to see. We also literally create experience from our own expectations to fill in gaps of what we are missing. An expression that has gained much popularity since the 1960’s is “We create our own reality”. Psychologically/perceptually we are doing this all the time. The true power of saying “We create our own reality” lay in the fact that; if we change our expectations and thus our perceptual filters, we will literally experience a different world around us. Then our transformed input will create a different, hopefully more useful, model of reality thus causing our thinking and our emotional responses to change. We then cannot help but to act toward the world around us in a way that may be more useful in this moment, and not just in ways that have been useful in the past.

A vague, intellectual understanding of how we participate in our own perception may not all that useful. Through a couple of easy exercises we will be able to experience how we are doing this in each moment.

The human mind is a marvelous device for not seeing what it doesn’t expect to see. A wonderful example of this can be seen in the following awareness test. Take a moment to play and watch the following video.