The Importance Of A Willingness To Perceive Reality
There is always one key factor that pops up again and again, throughout my experiences as a therapist, during conversations with people about psychology, and in my head when quietly observing a person’s “patterns”.
But first, just to introduce a few concepts.
Everyone looks at the world differently, and appreciating that is a massive step towards being a balanced, rational person. It allows you to accept peoples individual differences, rather than think “you don’t agree with me, therefore you’re wrong”, which describes a disturbingly high amount of peoples attitudes.
It leads to the attitude of having to control nature rather than flow with it, to bend the world to fit with an imagined set of expectations. People want to see the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Anything to the contrary is distorted, deleted or denied, anything that reinforces it is welcomed with open arms. Of course, nature doesn’t give a shit, and will gladly break down those walls when they became brittle enough, and this is usually the point of a “breakdown”.
This is the whole “the map is not the territory” thing, the failure to grasp of which lies at the heart of most mental illness.
But anyway, the main thing I was alluding to at the start is not the perception of reality, but just the willingness to perceive it. Are you going to irrationally defend what you want to believe, ignoring evidence to the contrary, or are you going to pay more attention to that evidence to learn something new? Are you going to stick to your negative belief systems that keep you hemmed inside of your life, or are you going to test them by wondering what it would be like if those beliefs weren’t true?
Basically, are you going to be willing to give up your bullshit to take further steps closer to reality, or choose to live with your bullshit forever more?
Because really, most of what people believe to be true (whether it be about their potential, how lovable they are, whether other people are threatening, whats scary etc) is bullshit. If it wasn’t, it would be a fact, and not a belief.
When talking to people about things, I can sometimes sense a “zone” where their irrational defensiveness kicks in. It wouldn’t be a problem for me to just avoid it. The problem arises where I’m invited to help them reinforce the belief. So if a typical conversation goes along the lines of people being horrible, or society being rubbish, or there being no options left anymore, I’m caught in a pressure point where if I don’t agree, they may become anxious and I know they’ll start putting me in that same bracket of hostility (“oh, you’re just like everyone else!” etc). Instead I’ll start challenging and eroding the edges, by asking incisive questions so that they are forced to corner themselves into facing their own irrationality head on (e.g. reminding them of a time that directly goes against what they are asking me to agree with). Whilst the effects of this can be powerful in the short term (“yeah, I suppose you’re right”), the overwhelming power of the mind to do what it can to protect what it wants to believe will ensure that its quickly forgotten about. A few days later, it will be the case of same bullshit, different day.
The Psychology of Scent
Scent is relatively neglected in terms of how much research and attention the other senses receive. More recently, research has been showing up all sorts of interesting things about smell, such as how our noses adapt to chemicals in the air within twenty minutes (i.e., we can’t smell them anymore).
You have likely experienced the strange phenomenon of having a whole era of your life come flooding into memory when you pass someone with a particular perfume or whiff of hair shampoo. Scent is more entwined with our emotions and memories than we give it credit for, and it operates largely on a purely subconscious level. This is why scent is now becoming a hot area in marketing research.
The picture is for Tom Tykwers movie adaption of Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume: Story of a Murderer. More information about the research of scent can be found here.
Would you have noticed?
One morning, a casual looking guy pulls out a violin and starts busking to people emerging from a tube station to go to work. Six classical pieces and 43 minutes later, over 1000 people had passed. Would you have stopped and listened? Probably not – who does? The difference here is that the busker was actually Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, once a child prodigy, playing on a $3.5m Stradivari, three days after filling Boston’s Symphony Hall for over $100 a seat. Its a perfect experiment to test the strength of recognition, genuine appreciation and values in a different context, with some conformity pressure thrown in too (if everyone else is passing by… then there’s no reason to stop, right?)
So what happened?