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Blind Spots and the Secret of the Reticular Activating System
Here’s a taste of the kind of seminar I deliver to Silicon Valley engineering managers. I have to get into their heads in the first ten minutes to prove I know something about their minds that they don’t; otherwise, they will dismiss me as a mere HR trainer who is wasting their time.
We think and act not in accordance with
the real truth, but the truth as we believe it.
Lou Tice, coach
Is seeing believing?
Take a moment and read what’s in the triangle below:
It says, “PARIS IN THE SPRING,” right?
Wrong. Read it again.
Isn’t it interesting how easily our mind creates a blind spot to what’s actually there? You see the two THEs, right?
But maybe you’ve already seen this Paris Triangle before. Try this sentence:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE
OF MANY YEARS OF EXPERTS.
Now go back and read the sentence one time and count the letters “F.” How many “Fs” are there? STOP! Do not read on until you have counted the “Fs” in the sentence.
Most people find three “Fs.” However, there are seven “Fs.” Go back and find them.
Still not seeing them? About 50% of people who read this sentence see only three “Fs” even after being told there are more. Isn’t it strange? You can be told that there are seven “Fs” and yet you still can’t see them.
If you don’t believe me, go back and count the “OFs” in the sentence.
Watch this Psychological Card Trick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvzSiUB6yV0
How does he do it? Watch it again and you may figure it out.
Watch the following video, which has you count the number of red suit cards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Ec6tTwkqg
Did you see the secret message? Isn’t it interesting how easily we can be blind to something happening right in front of us when we focus on something else nearby? (This is one secret of magicians and con artists.)
The same is true with this Passing the Basketball video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY
For those of you already familiar with this illusion, did you spot the two additional changes that took place right in front of your eyes?
Okay. So what? A few optical illusions, right? No big deal.
Well, it is a big deal, especially if you are concerned about seeing Truth in the world and inside of yourself.
It is a big deal if you go around
unaware that you have blind spots
to the Truth.
Great high-performing people, in sports or business or anywhere else, demonstrate an ability to focus and block out distractions, to create blind spots to everything irrelevant to what they are focusing on.
The basketball video demonstrates that when you focus on something, you may become blind to everything else. This ability to focus is good up to a point.
But there is a down side as well. When you lock on to what you believe the truth to be (or the “purpose” to be, like the purpose given to you to count the number of passes between players in white) that missile-lock can blind you to other important things going on.
This is how magicians work. And it’s how advertisers, media manipulators, politicians, and con artists generally work. They get you to lock on to one thing so you are blind to something else.
When you lock on to one “truth,”
you may be locking out the real Truth.
The fact is, if you want to change, to grow, to get to the Truth, whatever it may be, you may want to consider a few things:
1) How are blind spots created?
2) Do I have blind spots that limit or control me and my imagination?
3) How can I discover my blind spots?
4) How can I avoid creating blind spots that limit or control me?
5) How can I recognize blind spots in other people?
6) How can I recognize when others are intentionally or unintentionally trying to create blind spots in me?
7) How can I get past blind spots and into imagining and creating my life in a free-flowing manner with abundant energy?
Your blind spots may be keeping you
from having spontaneous
and continuing energy
to accomplish your goals.
The fact is, you are probably living only a small part of your potential. You hold these blind spots in the form of pictures about yourself, about others, and about reality. They keep you from doing what you are fully capable of doing.
Once you understand that, you can take more conscious control of creating your life.
Now let’s look more closely at how the mind creates blind spots.
A truly creative person rids him or herself
of all self-imposed limitations.
Gerald Jampolsky
Your mind has a powerful filtering system that creates blind spots.
Have you noticed how when you read a book and the story fills your imagination, the outer world begins to fade away? You don’t hear the traffic outside or someone calling for you. They have to speak more loudly just to get through to you.
Have you noticed how you can be at a party with everyone talking and you can hardly understand what anyone is saying? But when someone mentions your name, that gets through to you?
Have you noticed how when you fall asleep your senses slowly shut down, your body loses sensation, and then you are off to sleep? Then almost nothing gets through to you?
Our senses take in 11 million pieces of data in each moment, but we can only consciously process up to 40 pieces per second. The part of your brain working as a filter to manage sense perception is called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). [What follows is actually derived from a more complex physical system, but the RAS is a perfect stand-in when there is no need for complexity.]
If the mind didn’t have the RAS, you’d go crazy. Think of all the information coming in through all your senses. The sights, the sounds, the tactile sensations.
Think of all those little hairs on your body. If you focus on any part of your body, you would become aware of the sensation there.
The RAS is a network of cells in the center of the brain associated with waking, sleeping, attention, and focus. It physically filters irrelevant sensory input.
The RAS allows you to focus. It functions like an executive assistant, a kind of censor of what’s not important. It screens out the junk.
The RAS determines what information
gets through to you.
What you Value,
or what you think is a Threat.
As we focus on something important, things that are less important, things that we Devalue, fade away. Important information gets through, whatever we consider valuable or threatening.
This explains why teenagers can be watching TV or playing a video game, and a parent can call them to dinner and not be heard. The Value of the parent’s voice goes down in proportion to the importance of the TV.
This explains why eight people at a large dinner table can have cross conversations with each other and still carry on. As you focus on something important like your own conversation, the others nearby fade because they lose Value to you.
This explains why a new mother sleeps through the alarm clock going off, the jet flying overhead, and the truck driving by, but when the baby starts crying, she wakes up right away. The other sounds are not a Threat so they don’t get through the censor, but the threatening sound of the baby gets through.
What you Value gets through.
What you Devalue gets filtered out.
I knew a couple with a barking dog that kept half the neighborhood awake. The owners were never bothered by it. However, the barking threatened the neighbors’ peace of mind so it got through their mental filter.
But the owners loved their dog and were comforted and felt protected by its barking. They would have no problem sleeping through the night. Their neighbors may also have slept better if they understood that any burglars in the area would be warned off by a barking dog.
Once I worked at a company that decided to move my group to a different building. I was placed next to a service elevator.
You can imagine what that means. All day long, every day, I would hear that elevator opening and closing, opening and closing.
What did I do?
Because I knew about the RAS, I immediately told myself, “That elevator doesn’t matter to me.” When people asked me, “Isn’t that elevator going to bug you all day?” I’d answer, “No, I won’t even notice it.”
And almost from the beginning my RAS screened it out. It never bothered me.
A colleague who used to have an office was now in an open cube. He did not know about the RAS. He was used to closing the door and having quiet.
He would hear me talking on the phone over two cubes away and he would stand up and say, “Mark, you are talking too loud.”
Every sound was a threat to him, so every sound got through.
The key is knowing that you control what gets through.
It depends on how you
psychologically evaluate the sensation.
This fact is particularly important to teachers.
How often do we accuse a child of not paying attention to the teacher? But what if the teacher is not making the history lesson, or math lesson, or science lesson interesting to the child?
The teacher and the course material
fade away.
The child can be looking right at a teacher as the teacher explains something and not get it. (We all have experienced this. We lose interest, our minds wander, the filters kick in because we become interested in our own thoughts or daydreaming. And minutes go by where nothing the teacher/boss/television/ politician says gets through.)
What happens when the child sees no Value in what the teacher is saying?
The child’s RAS screens out the teacher. It’s the teacher’s job to make sure the class material is perceived as valuable by the child.
So the question is, what do you Value in life? And what do you Devalue?
Because now you know that if you devalue important things, they will not get through your mind’s automatic filter.
What do you Devalue?
Could what you Devalue actually hold Value?
How will you know if you are blind to it?
Can you recommend another MD for a second opinion?
2 time cancer survivor, maybe the 3rd time will be the charm
I would say that Venice starts at Marine Street, or the southern border of Santa Monica and extends east from the ocean to Lincoln Boulevard and south to Washington Boulevard. So to get there from Santa Monica, just go south anywhere west of Lincoln.
Historically this was probably different as building of Marina del Rey changed things quite a bit. Our house, built in 1927, shows Venice as the city on the deed. But we are next to Beethoven Avenue Elementary School which is now not Venice but rather Del Rey.
I’m surprised that anybody in Silicon Valley hasn’t already seen the “the the” trick before. I thought they were all up-to-date on the common cognitive bias memes. Whenever I see one of these sorts of tests my first instinct is to look for the trick, and I assume that enough people are like me to render most psychological experiments invalid.
Some of them do. Not all. At least 50% are from Asia and Europe.
I LOVED this post!
In no small part because I have often wrestled with this myself – that anything can be explained using one of an infinite range of languages – and each language necessarily creates this kind of filter. Similarly, no one language can capture the “truth” about that thing.
Think of a glass of water. Half full, half empty, drink, poison, birdbath, projectile… endless possibilities. Our language is the first pass of that filter. But without it, we are like newborn babies, unable to filter enough to create a story in our minds.
Mark, I think your explanation conflates two distinct mechanisms. The blind spot phenomena you show are not due to RAS filtering; they’re an artifact of the basic cortical algorithm of prediction. That’s a different thing than selective attention to high-value signals, which is what RAS provides.
True. The blind spot section sets up multiple things that show up later, including how the adaptive unconscious works, but the primary point is to demonstrate how you can look at something, be told what is right there before you, and still not see it, to the pint of doubting you are being told the truth.
Until someone (especially engineers) directly experience these kinds of blind spots, they may not be open to the possibility of tracking down and identifying their own blind spots to true innovation.
Hope that makes sense.
I often read and reread my own comments and correct typos. Sometimes I reread a comment a few days later and see “on” where I thought I typed “in”. it shows that I see what I expect to see, or just gloss over it and don’t even see it at all.
Emphasis added. That’s the blind spot effect. It’s not filtering, it’s generation.
Nobody can be their own editor, the pain that every writer discovers…
Sure, anyone can do it. Given time between writing and editing. Of course, then you’re not the same person as you were when you wrote it. 😁
I sometimes see a post resurface after a month or two and read a comment that I made and don’t recognize it. It seems interesting but dry and cogent. And when I see that I wrote it, I say, That’s not me! But, yeah, it is.
I suppose that’s the way editors work, too. They see what’s written and not what was intended.
I once went partially blind in one eye. The person I was talking to, I couldn’t see the left half of his face unless I looked away and saw it with my peripheral vision. But when I looked at him directly I couldn’t see it. It’s not that there was a black spot, or an empty spot, but a flesh-colored blank area without any specific details, no eye, no side of the nose, half his mouth missing. It’s as if my visual system filled in the missing area from the sides, sort of like photoshopping.
Come to think of it, I’ve been able to do something like this on demand all my life. In college I would be deep in thought and staring at a salt shaker and realize that the salt shaker was no longer there, just an empty table top. So I put — I was very young — I put a piece of paper behind the salt shaker and made it disappear again. The salt shaker disappeared and the wood grained table top filled in, but no piece of paper. Dang, I was really hoping for x-ray vision.
That’s exactly what it’s doing.
You remind me. I’ve done that too. Ok, time for experiment.
Let us know if you see the piece of paper.
Doctor Robert = Dr. Mass Hole
Don’t tell me you didn’t get it. But then, I don’t get this.
If I saw it, it’d be a lie. My cortex may fill in the blanks, but it doesn’t lie.
He’s obsessing on a remark from 4 days ago.
Ok, good. He’ll get over it then.
How would you know that you weren’t the only one in the world who can see through a column of salt?
I just started A Thousand Brains, new from Jeff Hawkins who also wrote On Intelligence, which might be the most important popular science book I’ve ever read. I don’t know what this book adds to his earlier thesis, but I’m betting it’s that when signals enter L.IV they compete via short-range inhibitory connections. And when the column finally lights up after that, then a barrel of adjacent columns competes as well. But I haven’t gotten past the first chapter, so I don’t know.
’cause physics and stuff. Seeing thru a column of salt would take a Lot of work.
I had an epiphany
I had an Epiphone once but I sold it after my bro’ told me it wasn’t pronounced like that.
The secret’s in the retinal receptors. Like Geordi LaForge: “I can see meuons, youons and pewons.” For 25 years I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to make that joke.
Now is when you laugh.
epi-phone, epi-pen…
Whoa…eponymic, mam!
What an awesome word. The thing that is named. With that in mind, I ain’t no ma’m.