Laurel…. Yanny…. Laurel….Yanny….Laurel…. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who now has this computerised voice firmly tattooed in their brain.
For me it started out as a clear unmistakable Yanny which caused no end of arguing with my daughter who was a Laurel. How could we be listening to the same thing and hearing it completely differently? At some point my brain switched to Laurel, and Yanny has completely disappeared. Where did it go? If you don't know what I'm talking about a quick search on Google will reveal all.
What I do love about this experiment and others like this though, is that it shows us that how we see our reality is abstract, and what becomes concrete is more about how we interpret things based on variables, ours and also others. This then leads on to what we will interpret as our "reality" and what we will continue to predict and to expect. All this apparently happening in nano seconds, neuro science tells us. Aren't we just amazing that we are biologically wired to do this? It always blows me away how exquisitely designed we all are and that unless we have a brain impairment then we are all capable of this if we are prepared to accept the responsibility of our own thinking and our response-ability. What differs between people is how entrenched some thinking has become due to the environments we have been exposed to, which as children we have no choice — but as adults we do.
This doesn't mean that to change our thinking is easy — it takes practice. Awareness is the first step, but awareness alone will be useless, action is the key if it's change that's needed. Neuro science reminds us all the time about our brain plasticity and how we are MORE than what we think we are. Our brains are constantly trying to work things out and predict what's going to happen next, that's just what we do. It does this based on what it already knows, so if we come across something that we've never experienced before then we will try and fill in the gaps based on past experiences. Sadly because of this, a lot of the time our emotions and our belief systems can get in the way of our ability to move forward or to accept another's view.
Our emotions are very real and an instant feedback loop for our immediate attention! They can work for our good or they can work against us. It's up to us how we are going to interpret them. It might be helpful to remember that we weren't born with these powerful emotions, we learnt them! Which means we can unlearn them. How we see ourselves IS our mental health and faced with challenges we can learn to turn those around. Challenges can force us to think outside of our norms, and if we are successful at that then we can increase our ability to extend our scope so that new norms are made.
It's called evolution.
www.carlascoachingforhealth.com Carlas Coaching for Health: www.facebook.com/1on1onone/
