It hadn't even reached 7:30am and there was I getting onto a train to work in London for the day. Clutching the regular sized station tea in one hand and my bag in the other I sat down in the first available seat, only to spend the next couple of minutes getting organised and settled.
I have always loved the journey up to town but if you knew me well, you would know I am an owl by preference not a lark, and anything before 8:30am is a bit of a no-go area for me. So you can imagine, that duvet was still hugging me from a great distance and I was sitting next to people who were sniffing and sneezing—just what I really wanted!
It then dawned on me, does this train stop at London Bridge or is it the fast one through to Waterloo? I glanced up and looked at the board, it was still scrolling through the information; please mind the gap between the station and Iran. I stopped, looked again and yes that’s what it said. I watched again but slowly, keeping my eyes on the scrolling set of dots representing letters and then I saw why I had been caught; the tops of the letters had been chopped off by the cover which had slipped on one side. I grinned widely and the man opposite me looked up and, I suspect, thought I was laughing at him, because he blushed deeply and lifted his newspaper higher so hiding my face.
The irony of the mistake just tickled me and the smile failed to leave; how intimidating that is for commuters, who were averting their eyes everywhere so as to avoid the possible eye contact with this woman.
How many times have you found yourself doing something similar? You see a leaf or a piece of rubbish in the road and from behind the wheel of the car you wonder whether its an injured bird, or a snake. In Spain this summer, there was a rock I could see over the balcony and it looked remarkably like a cat crouched down watching something.
We have distorted what is there to fit in with what we presume is there and we get all the emotions associated with our presumption.
Our ability to distort is amazing and we use it as a way of distilling down the information which is continuously coming towards us. As John Cassidy Rice said, if a woman having a baby consciously registered everything that was happening throughout the birth it would take years for the mother to process the information and the baby would probably be six or seven years old when it was born!
We cannot process the millions of pieces of information which is always coming towards us at any one time so we generalise, delete and distort it down to about seven pieces per second (a lot less than the 16 million per second scientists now agree we are bombarded by).
So, I am going to ask a rhetorical question, what do we distort?
Our interpretation of the world around us.
Think about this statement;
We do not see the world we only see what we think the world is like.
and now consider this one;
We presume every one sees the world the same way.
But do they? Not everyone will see the stick which looks like a snake, or read the sign as ‘Iran’ and not ‘Train’; not everyone will presume the same thing from what the doctor has said, or the neighbour intimated. . . . but we presume they do.
So let’s take this to another level; let’s say there is a conversation going on between two people about where their relationship is going. One has distorted it so it appears sad, bad and ending, the other that it is obviously going through a rough patch but it will get through, how will their conversation sound? Where will it go and what are the possible ramifications of the differences in their distortions of the actual situation? It could be that one of them isn’t getting something as often as they would like to satisfy a need within them, and as we know our desire to satisfy ‘need’ is very strong.
There is always the good humoured comment, ‘Women come from Venus whilst men come from Mars’. What it is saying is exactly right, there are fundamental differences with the way men and women view the world, what is a priority to one is not going to be a priority to the other. Biologically we are programmed differently so as to fulfil our roles of hunter and mother, so our view of the world will be different even though society has created superficial change in this respect. Let's face it not many men go out with a club and bring home their kill fo rthe partner to gut and skin!
So taking this to another stage let's think about couples when they first get together. Initially couples only ‘see’ the similarities and spend much brain time comparing like with like. It is important to create a relationship with someone who is like yourself because that is what makes the unconscious most content.
"YOU are so like me, you must be wonderful!"
It is only later as the couple get used to one another the differences become noticed and then these can make the difference which either make it better or break it down. But the people haven’t changed in any way, what has been deleted and distorted has and that is the difference.
"YOU were so wonderful when I first knew you but you've changed!"
It is an internal change in sorting, they haven't changed, you have in the way you sort and think and prioritise those 7+/-2 pieces of information.
So where does this take us? We are looking at how the brain sorts information into what it deems important. As we age we change our perspectives and as these change so too do our sorting processes. The ‘seven year itch’ is a classic example of this. A couple have been together for approximately seven years (to a Kinesiologist this is one cycle in a person’s life) and there is irritation building between them. They have changed since they met, they have grown wiser and have experienced more, so their filters change to absorb the new information around them. This shows up in the comparator they run between themselves and their partner who may now be running a set of filters which no longer interest. What does he or she do? Well often it’s the time when affairs begin, there is a need to satisfy something which appears to be missing so the ‘grass is always greener’ comes into play. Yet, if the couple stopped and acknowledged the growth and absorbed that into the way they related to one another the partnership would grow.
Question: you are in business and your partners and yourself make no changes in the business over seven years, would the business still be growing? Would it still have the same fire it had on conception? Would the enthusiasm still be running?
Answer: I would expect the business would have gone to the wall or at least be approaching it and the partners would be sick of each other’s inability to grow and develop.
So what is so different between a business and a couple coming together to run a household?
Distortions are useful because they help us generalise out things in our lives and make it easier for us to adapt to minor changes. Here is an example.
I have been with T-Mobile for many years now and have always had a Nokia phone. I like them and the way they work but each time I have up-graded, the way in which it is presented and the extra features which go with it mean I have to re-learn the way to use it. However, I have distorted and generalised the way to make a phone call or send a text, I immediately look for that common thread, and because I stick to the same make it is there. In this instance the distortion acts so as to filter out other possibilities. Clever use of marketing here which I can assure you will know all about this and more besides and cash in on it so as to keep the faithful exactly that.
I watched the screen in the train as it scrolled through its various messages; each time it came to the platform I saw how just by losing the top of one letter completely threw me. I wonder how many other distortions would catch me today?
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