Every moment, through our various senses, flows millions of bits of experience that overwhelm our capacity to be aware. And if you include the mind, with its stream of thoughts as sensory input, it is easy to see that even to sit quietly at a window entails far more than we consciously know. All the colors and shapes in our visual field, every minute part of our bodies, every sound, taste and smell, plus the stream of mental activity, is a vast array, only a tiny fraction of which we consciously register. But which fraction do we register? What we pay attention to and what we delete forms a very interesting perspective on our uniqueness, on who we are.
Based on our history, our biology, our environment, we develop a way of prioritizing all this input. We attend to some information more than others. One of the most basic filters, is our tendency to favor one sense system over others. Most of us know in general whether we are more sensitive to visual or auditory information, for example. But even within one sense system there can be filters.
Both me a dear friend of mine are visual people. My friend is a city dweller, whereas I grew up on the water with a much leaner visual landscape. Two events showed the effects of our environment on what we saw. First, when we were sitting on a beach, I commented on a couple of large boats I saw out on the horizon. My friend literally could not see them. Those specks were indistinguishable from the horizon. Shortly thereafter, we weere riding in a cab going to a restaurant neither of us had ever been to in mid-town Manhattan. When we were still two blocks away, my friend, with no apparent effort, spotted the cafe’s sign in what appeared to me to be an utter sea of visual confusion. With great effort, I finally saw it when we were 50 yards away. Clearly, we attended to, and filtered out, quite different visual information.
Knowing some of the many filters we use to organize our experience I have found both useful and fun. To know our filters is to know ourselves, or at least some interesting aspect. And a good place to start is our simple sense preferences for sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Do you know yours? Can you detect this preference in others?
To know it, you simply need to pay attention to what people say and do (yourself included) related to that sense. Does someone say, “I see what you mean,” or do they say, “that sounds good to me”? People do not choose their metaphors randomly; they are a direct reflection of the sense system they use and prefer. Is someone bothered by the sound in the restaurant, or do they never fail to comment on how you look? Which is more likely to distract someone from their task or conversation, a sight or a sound? We tell each other about ourselves all the time. See what you notice.