Are You Seeing
Are you seeing or is your brain deciding what you should
see?
Read the following paragraph.
"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinvervtisy, it
deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the litteers in a wrod are, 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 a porbelm. Tihs is besauae ocne
we laren how to raed we bgien to aargnre the lteerts in our mnid to see waht we
epxcet to see. The huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
preecsievs the wrod as a wlohe. We do tihs ucnsoniuscoly wuithot tuhoght."
Amazing, isn’t it? You’re finding meaning in a mass of
jumbled letters. How is this possible?
Think of your mind as a dish of jelly which has settled so
that its surface is perfectly flat. When information enters the mind, it
self-organizes. It is like pouring warm water on the dish of jelly with a
teaspoon. Imagine the warm water being poured on the jelly dish and then gently
tipped so that it runs off. After many repetitions of this process, the surface
of the jelly would be full of ruts, indentations, and grooves.
New water (information) would start to automatically flow
into the preformed grooves. After a while, it would take only a bit of
information (water) to activate an entire channel. This is the pattern
recognition and pattern completion process. Even if much of the information is
out of the channel, the pattern will be activated. The mind automatically
corrects and completes the information to select and activate a pattern.
In our paragraph, your brain takes a bit of information (the
first and last letters) and activates the "word" channel and you see
and understand the word. This is why when we sit down and try to will new ideas
or solutions, we tend to keep coming up with the same-old, same-old ideas.
Information is flowing down the same ruts and grooves making the same-old
connections producing the same old ideas over and over again.
Creativity occurs when we tilt the jelly dish and force the
water (information) to flow into new channels and make new connections. These
new connections give you different ways to focus you attention and different
ways to interpret whatever you are focusing on. These different ways of
focusing your attention and different ways of interpreting what you are
focusing on lead to new insights, original ideas and solutions.
