Vibrational Availability: how our brain distorts people and reality – Mini Episode
The brain, more than anything, is a predictive system. It conserves energy by attempting to predict - rather than truly understand - what is in front of it. When information is missing, it fills in the blanks based on its past. It seeks out cues that confirm its predictions and distorts or ignores anything that could contradict what it already predicted to be true. Our earliest experiences in social settings, including family systems, may influence these predictive models in ways that negatively impact our potential. The mind-brain-body creates algorithms and predictive models by using our PAST to make assumptions about what’s happening NOW. The brain is doing this to be an efficient problem-solver. Algorithms and predictive models provide a logic or series of if-then sequences and associations we can apply instead of having to calculate every single possibility. The problem with this efficiency, is that these predictive models may prevent us from seeing situations and people (including ourselves) as they actually are. Instead, we’re seeing them through our models - or paradigms - that are built from our history. To listen to this as an audio article (with more in-depth ideas of how to increase your Vibrational Availability), listen on Spotify Apple Podcasts Blubrry Media Player The assumptions we make about a person are really just how that person filters through our predictive models. Most of your predictive models all started with the very beginning of you and your first caregivers. How they reacted and responded to you.. to your cries, your giggles, your demands, your distress. All that started a predictive modeling process for you. You started to predict human behavior based on the very small sampling of data you got from only a few select people in your world. over and over again for the first years of your life. Many of the predictions and computations your brain is using NOW were created back THEN. And the interactions from your past were affected by the stress, context, and maturity of your caregivers, and how they were able to respond to you. (which was also affected by their caregivers, etc.) Because we each had different histories, we all have different filters. My senses are going to filter how I perceive that person based on all of the associations I have from my past experiences. And so will yours. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//forms.aweber.com/form/24/1430274624.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, "script", "aweber-wjs-kba0n6qyf")); If we interact with a person through one of our filters, there's a good chance they will react to our predictive mechanisms - which can make them feel less understood. To expand beyond the filters that distort our perception, we must find ways to stay open to the actual, ‘live data' of that situation or person - in their most evolv...