4day

Thank you for your private and public comments. Please feel free to share more of your reflections, experiences and questions as I continue to add entries to this Blog. If it strikes you, send it to your friends, your coworkers, your family, your boss your significant other now. You never know when the entry that describes them will appear. On a more serious note this Blog is a gift to myself. I write in the hope that others will derive a benefit from it. Thank you BB (a nickname) for being the inspiration for yesterday’s entry.

4day
Often people assume that their initial reaction to a person, place or thing is the real or the only relevant reaction that they need to have. I disagree.

Perception is a greatly studied phenomenon that I will be discussing and referring to in other Blog entries, so I think it is important to have a “working” definition of this concept. For the sake of brevity and simplicity I include the following from Wikipedia:

("Perception," 2006) states “there are two basic theories of perception: Passive Perception (PP) and Active Perception (PA).

(PP) surrounding → input (senses) → processing (brain) → output (re-action).

(PA)
dynamic relationship between “description” (in the brain) ↔ senses ↔ surrounding.

Please keep in mind that the operative word in the above paragraph is THEORY. A word that could be applied to most of what we label as fact. Personally, I find the idea that we use instruments like math (another theory) to validate other theories hilarious but I digress. In the above the “description” (in the brain), in part, refers to the past experience of said person, place or thing. To get a better idea read the paragraph below.
Accordrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in; the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Your brain, unless you are dyslexic, fills in the blanks. There are numerous theories for why the brain processes information in this way including the instinct to survive.
In the days of old lions and tigers and bears were a real threat. Contemplating a course of action each and every time one encountered a threat could severely shorten one’s life span. At the instant of encountering a bear it is vitally important that one has previous experience that dictates a course of action ie run! Research in this area is now being conducted. Before I go on I would like to add a caveat. In most instances, researchers or the companies that pay for research studies, have an agenda. Research tends to attain expected results that is of course with the exception of the undergraduate research project you had to do and didn’t plan, implement or write up until the night before it was due. How does this make me respond to most research studies? With a significant amount of skepticism. That said, some recent research findings seem to indicate that the brain often recalls the worst-case scenario as a means to ensure survival.
NOTE: In the case of the propagation of the human race all bets are off. Standard operating procedure during this period (love) seems to be…make babies, don’t think. (I hope you are laughing). We literally become salmon swimming upstream, at times, to our metaphoric death (another Blog entry). Again I digress, back to the moment of perception and why this is of any interest at all.
According to the above, the moment of perception and response is informed or shaped by the worst-case scenario. Why do you care?

If the moment that you are having a feeling response to a person, place or thing is in any way, shape or form related to an experience that was deemed threatening, there is a good chance that your emotional response in the current instant will be negative or protective regardless of whether any real threat exists. Your response is being shaped by what I label false interpretations, fantasies or past experiences that may at some point have helped you to survive. In the extreme, where this pattern is consistently reinforced and becomes your modus operandi (those who have endured trauma, abuse or other extreme difficulty in childhood), the world may start to appear as a dark, threatening and lonely place regardless of tangible evidence to the contrary. In the case where the difficulty and reward has been more balanced, we see a similar but less striking outcome. Perhaps a person who spends an inordinate amount of time making things up that are frequently punishing, anger producing or just generally negative. For example, someone asks how you are and instead of experiencing this moment and person as a caring you perceive them as intrusive and interrogating. The even milder version of this can be seen in the instance when there is no real tangible way to determine the intention of another person however you have written, produced, filmed and determined the outcome of a situation with out asking one real question.
In order to counteract this phenomenon, practice ignoring your initial reaction and apply the following rule:

If your brain is going to make up a story and you are not in immanent danger, make up a story that lifts you up instead of dragging you down.

Then perhaps you will be able to give yourself the opportunity to exercise the gift of choice that I spoke about in my 2day Blog entry. More to come tomorrow….