Understanding that perception is not reality.....

We are constantly bombarded by sensory input in our day to day lives and it can be quite overwhelming sometimes, but what is perhaps even more overwhelming is that what we realise we perceive from that sensory input is only a tiny fraction of what our senses are actually telling us. Our eyes for example can perceive a single photon of light. Our ears are capable of picking up an incredible range of frequencies, our sense of smell is so refined that it can detect a single molecule, and yet all of this data is instantly filtered by the brain in such a way that we are not even aware that we have perceived it. just take a look outside. The colours that you are seeing all around you are not the real colours as the eye is perceiving them, but our minds filter the input to make something manageable. It is quite incredible really.

But there is a point to all this. Our minds are strange and wonderful places and they act without concious control to keep us safe and to give us the information that is vital rather than simply overloading us. This can have a twist though, because if our perception of reality in the form of the physical world can be and is skewed by our minds, how much more likely is it that our perceptions of things which are not physical, i.e. thoughts, dreams, interpretations of other peoples intentions and so on are also being skewed in a similar way. To what extent, if at all can we rely on the information that our minds are giving us. Further, is it possible by training the mind, to achieve a state whereby we are more in control of the filters that our minds employ.

I have a friend who is a gamekeeper. She spends all day out in the fields observing, monitoring, tracking and stalking. Her eyesight is technically no better than mine (we have similar prescription glasses) but she is aware of far more going on around us than I am. She will see movement in her peripheral vision that I don't even notice and hear birdsong way before I do. She has trained herself over twenty years or so to be considerably more aware of her surrounds than I am, and logically this would suggest that she has managed to re-train the way her mind filters inputs. If this is possible, can we modify the less concrete perceptions in a similar way? If we can then it would lend far more credence to affirmation therapies as well as to things like NLP and CBT, but in order to do this do we need to better understand the way in which the mind works and how these filters are implemented and by what part of the brain?

I would suggest that we do, and that it will become ever more pressing as we become less and less attuned to our environment and more and more attuned to virtual reality......