You Don’t React, You Remember
Imagine for a moment that the second you were born you were placed in a small, pitch-black, airtight, soundproof room. For your entire life, you never get to leave this room... you live and die here.
In order for you to experience the outside world, your captor has given you a monitor connected to two remote cameras so you can see what the outside world looks like. A couple of speakers continuously play the audio feed from a microphone near the remote cameras. Smells from the outside world are described on your monitor so you have some sort of twisted idea of what scents are like. Descriptions of what food taste like periodically pop up on your monitor as well. And just to rub it in, your captor frequently flashes descriptions on your monitor of how various things feel.
This is essentially how your brain and your five main senses operate. Your brain lives its entire life in a small, dark world (AKA your head) and is fed information through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin.
Of course, this is an oversimplification because in addition to information coming in from your five main senses, your mind is flooded with a massive amount of data every second of your life just to keep you alive... such as breathing, regulating your body temperature, and digesting your lunch just to name a few. Your unconscious mind handles most of this work. If your conscious mind had to attend to every bodily process that’s happening at any one moment as your unconscious does, it would constantly be on overload. Your unconscious mind, for example, predicts when you’re about to stand up before you consciously know you are going to take that action. In preparation, your unconscious mind raises your blood pressure (among many other things) so you don’t become lightheaded or pass out when you stand up.
Your five main senses are subjective at best. As information flows into your mind, you have to apply what you already know to make sense of the information. For example, if your ears detect a particular sound wave while driving, your mind searches its files to add meaning to the data coming in. At that point, you realize it’s someone blowing their horn behind you because the light is green. You feel a rush of adrenaline and jump into action. You are not reacting to the horn being blown behind you, however. What you are reacting to is the memory of past experiences.
Let’s suppose that you are walking along a wooded path with a friend. As you walk past a pile of leaves, they begin to move and rustle. Your senses feed that information to your mind and your mind begins to go through its files to pull out all the data that relates to what is happening. You quickly determine that what is happening is similar to another time in your life when a snake slithered out from under some cut grass. You take off running!
Your friend sees the pile of leaves begin to move and rustle as well. Her senses feed that information to her mind and it begins to go through its files to pull out all the data that relates to what is happening. Your friend, however, reaches down and clears the leaves away with her hands, because she decides what is happening is similar to a time she found a baby bunny hiding in her flowerbed.
Both you and your friend are not reacting to what is actually happening; you are acting based on past experiences.
When you help humans change the reactions they have to external stimuli, understand that you are not dealing with reality… you are dealing with memories. The solution is not to understand the past experiences. Instead, focus on giving them more options… more flexibility. With more options than what they currently have, humans will tend to choose a better way of doing things.
Humans make choices based on the knowledge they currently have. Expand their options; improve their lives.
