11,000,000 and 40,000… so what?

You have approximately 11 million bits of information bombarding your senses per second. At one of the next processing levels of your brilliant brain, you can cope with up to 40 thousand bits of information per second. Then, refining your focus to the practical conscious level, you can be attentive to 7 (give or take 2) chunks of information at any one time.

We share this information to make one simple point: there’s an awful lot of ‘reality’ that doesn’t get attention. But does that make the ‘stuff’ that doesn’t get attention any less true as a reality? No, it doesn’t.  We make choices about the versions of reality we are attentive to. Those choices are often habitual – mental shortcuts, the posh word for which is ‘heuristics’. Heuristics save us tons of time and effort by allowing us to jump to conclusions about reality. “Oh, here we go again!” “Typical!!!” are both examples that a heuristic may be operating.

Knowing that you can choose your reality, and that you are indeed doing exactly that right now can be utterly liberating.

The graphic shows my Moodscope for Sunday 13th July. The score is 25%. I’m in pain, can hardly move because of gout, and am concerned about the outcome of my heart operation next Thursday. The Moodscope scores give me 20 vantage points to view this reality from. Imagine getting locked out of your car, and thinking your keys have slid under the driver’s seat. You look through the driver’s window, but can’t see the keys, so you lean over the windscreen to look through that – still no keys. Finally, you move to a new vantage point, the front passenger’s window, and from there you can see the keys under the driver’s seat.

My reality today is 25% - pretty low. I’d like to change my choice of realities. One way to help is shifting vantage point. Moodscope gives me 20 to view this current reality from. Since I cannot cope with 20, I’m going to choose 1. And it doesn’t have to be the highest scoring or lowest scoring - it only has to be a choice. So, I’m going to choose ‘Interested’ – I’d like to become more interested today.

The reason I’ve scored reasonably high on ‘interested’ is that I picked up some secondhand books on physics – a subject I hated at school but have become interested in. Also, I composed and arranged a couple of pieces using the sounds Vangelis is famous for. Both of these hook my interest and are easy to expand upon. Thus, I have a cunning plan…

This is our call to action today. Having got the feedback from your Moodscope (and you may need to make a note of your specific scores or look at your affectogram), what would it take to move you up one point higher in just one of the vantage points? This would shift your score and your reality. Good choice!

Lex

A Moodscope member