"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
— WAYNE DYER
Wayne was a self-help author and motivational speaker, but he was really on to something, and more than just the benefits of having a positive attitude.
Coming up on Haman Nature before too long, Tyrone and I are going to start talking a little about how our brains/minds/consciousnesses “work”.
Of course, step one of such an endeavor is to admit that we don’t really know much about our minds. We have many more questions than answers. There’s a fascinating “interface” between the gray matter “meat” and the seemingly ephemeral consciousness thingy that we can only describe as something like “what it seems like to be ‘us’”.
As a prelude to that, I’m going to ask/recommend that you check out an episode of the Natural Order Podcast that I do with my buddy Brian D. O’leary. Brian and I usually talk together about interesting things, but on this episode, I went solo and talked about how our beliefs literally alter our perceptions.
I give a lot of really cool examples in there that shatter the mechanistic way we usually think about how our senses and our minds interact. It’s far more interesting (and weird) than just some version of: Our eyes are basically a camera, and our ears a microphone, and when we are awake our brains take in these inputs and recognize them and then we reason about these things.
Far from it. I hope you check the episode out. It’s “homework”, I know. But it’s the fun kind.
To find the episode I’m talking about, you can search for “Natural Order Podcast” in any podcatcher out there in the world. It’s #9 and the title is “Believing is seeing… literally!”. Or you can just click that link right there.
I didn’t answer every question in that episode, or close every loop, or mention every caveat. But it’s still a really cool episode. Can’t wait to hear back from you all about what you think about it.
Naturally,
Adam