How Your Attention Span Works - part 4 of "The Power of Perception"

Does our conscious mind ever get hijacked into paying attention to meaningless bullsh*t?  How does that happen?

Transcript

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In the pursuit of true freedom, we often encounter a paradox where perception and objective reality seem to be at odds. Consider a person in a wheelchair who feels freer than an able-bodied individual trapped in a toxic relationship. The person in the wheelchair might experience a profound sense of freedom due to their mental and emotional state, despite their physical limitations. Conversely, the able-bodied person in a toxic relationship might feel utterly constrained, their freedom stifled by emotional turmoil and psychological distress. The simple conclusion here is that perception plays a pivotal role in shaping our sense of freedom, often overshadowing the objective circumstances of our own lives. But what is the mechanism at work here? And how can it be overcome? Have you ever sat in front of a television, remote control in hand, clicking through the channels? You skip over the content that looks boring or repulsive, searching for something that captures your interest, something stimulating. Now imagine that there's a part of your brain that functions just like that remote control. Tuning your conscious attention out of the channels it does not want to see, and tuning you into the ones where it finds expectations of reward. Expectation of pleasure, the threat of danger, or the dramatic middle ground that contains both. Bridging the brain stem, sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain, and our higher brain centers is a structure called the reticular activating system, or RAS. I'm probably just going to call it the RAS. Our brain stem controls our most basic physical functions from heart rate to breathing. It's also wired into pain and aversion. It's what causes your hand to automatically pull back when touching a hot stove. It is directly connected to our most basic drives and in combination with the RAS, likely responsible for the age-old expression love is blind. The reticular activating system filters information at a subconscious level, guiding our focus according to what it deems to be important. It plays a crucial role in directing our attention, acting as a gatekeeper that determines what information reaches our conscious minds. It controls what our conscious mind tunes into or flees from. The devastating effects of trauma on human perception cannot be understated. It is the most blunt, crude, compelling driving force behind the development of cognitive distortions. And the most powerful of these distortions reside within the reticular activating system. But can we retrain our RAS to overcome these distortions? The answer is yes. It can be as simple as making gratitude a daily practice. If you list those things that you are grateful for as a daily ritual, it can simply be recited in thought. You train your Raz to highlight the positive aspects of your life. This practice shifts your perception away from avoiding the negative and towards pursuing the positive. If you make this a regular practice, your mind becomes more attuned to the abundance of positive opportunities around you instead of being focused on avoiding negative constraints. Another practice that reduces the power of the reticular activating system is patience. Another way of expressing this is giving a person or an idea the benefit of the doubt for a time. Hear someone out that you'd rather not listen to, or investigate an issue that you disagree with or that makes you feel uncomfortable, you will find that sometimes, not every time, but sometimes, those instinctive aversions rooted in the RAS are keeping meaningful knowledge away from your conscious mind. But the RAS is not just your reptilian brain controlling your conscious awareness. It's bidirectional. It's a two-way street. The placebo and nocebo effects demonstrates how the RAS works in the other direction, how our conscious mind can and does impact our physical state. Placebos are inert substances that produce beneficial therapeutic effects simply because the patient believes they will work. Conversely, nocebos are inert substances 100% the same as the placebo in composition, but they produce harmful physical effects due to negative expectations. This phenomenon highlights how our conscious perception can actively influence our physical and emotional well-being. When we believe in the potential for healing and liberation, we more often experience it. This is clear evidence of the profound impact that our mindset has on creating our physical and emotional experience of reality. But this aspect of the Raz is also something that magicians, marketing agencies, and politicians know all too well. And so, like all knowledge, it can be used to our benefit or to our detriment. It can be used to enlighten or to deceive. It can be used to subjugate or to liberate. The key here is our self-awareness, because our self-awareness creates the ground where bad seeds might sprout but then wither, while good seeds sprout and then prosper. And this is true for us individually as it is for society. If our world is to improve, our beliefs must be rooted in truth. Our minds keen to tell truth from fiction, perception from deception, and freedom from mental slavery. You've been listening to part four of Power of Perception. In our next segment, we're going to take a look at how learning is effortless when it's aligned with our inner motivations.