scienceofselfhealing.com

Have you ever wondered why something you considered beautiful was considered uninspiring at best by someone else? Or why eye-witnesses to accidents or crimes never seem to agree on what happened? Or why an event from childhood that you remember with joy is remembered with anger or sadness by your sibling, or maybe not recalled at all?We take information in through our senses (sight, sound, feel, taste, scent, etc.), process it with our critical thinking faculty (i.e. conscious mind) and send it to the unconscious mind for storage. Perception is the meaning, or label, we attach to that information. The catch is that we’re bombarded by enormous amounts of information every second - different sources say anywhere from 2 million to 400 billion bits of information per second, 24/7, waking and sleeping - and the conscious mind can’t process (attach meaning to) all of it.

The conscious mind can process only an infinitesimal amount of this information - an average of 130 bits per second. Using a hierarchy of selection, your conscious mind picks the information most important to it in that second, and someone else’s chooses what’s most crucial to them in that moment. With so much information to choose from, the likelihood that two people will choose all the same information is low to non-existent, & the probability that those two people will attach the same meaning to the common bits is, well, just not going to happen. This is why each of us has our own unique perception of the world around us.

To paraphrase Mike Dooley, the delightful and inspiring speaker, author, and creator of TUT.com (TUT=Totally Unique Thoughts), it’s as if everyone on Earth wears glasses, and every pair of glasses has different colored lenses. The lenses not only color the scene differently, but based on their color, they may also block out certain other colors. Some lenses might block the color blue, others the color yellow. You can see how this would give each wearer a different picture (perception) of the world around them. Oh, and you can’t trade glasses with anyone else; you can only IMAGINE what they see!

The same principle is at work when our minds are selecting which information to pay attention to. As with the hypothetical glasses, you can’t trade your perceptions with someone else so they’ll see what you see, or vice versa. You CAN, however, understand that there’s a reason why individuals have different views of people, places, things, and events, and why it’s such a waste of energy to try to convince others that they’re wrong and you’re right. You’re both right, based on the information your minds are processing!

We’re each doing the best we can with what we have to work with, and what we have to work with are our perceptions of the world around us. Can those perceptions be changed? Yes. We can each, individually, create change within ourselves that will help us perceive differently, so the answer is a qualified “yes.” Qualified, because while we can mindfully change our own perceptions about what’s happening around us, we cannot do it for others.

If you want change, your only choice is to change YOU in some way, and understanding how perception works when interacting with the world around you is another step on the path to change.