6 Listen Activity 5

Perception is what happens when our brain takes the sights, sounds, and smells of the world and, using our brain cells creates a reality. Perception is a type of experience of the world that is unique to each person.

Now back to attention. We’ve already learned how difficult it is to focus. Part of that is the fault of our brains deciding what to experience from the world.

Take a look at this image:

How good of a look did you get?

Now look at this picture. It looks similar with the exception of a few changes. Now it is likely you can easily answer the two questions from above, and most of us remember something about the picture but have to admit that we didn’t remember it perfectly.

My guess is that you didn’t get all of those and you have to scroll back and forth to see the changes. To form our reality, we have to recognize the limitations of our ability to pay attention. Like the picture, we fail to remember so many details of our world; and with good reason because it would = information overload! Sometimes though we WISH we could remember a detail that may be important later (think being an eyewitness to a car accident and being asked to remember the color and type of car or missing detail from a class reading that your instructor asks a question about on an exam. When we miss something “important,” it may be no fault of our own – it is something called innattetional blindness.

Once changes are brought to your attention, you cannot un-see them. This is the magic of attention. Once we know what to pay attention to (especially in our learning), we are so much more likely to remember and know it. Just like the details in this scene, what we are learning can be made more or less important by the amount of attention we pay to new information. Once we are told the importance of our attention and focus, we begin to become more self-aware.