They've always been there, of course, the words and the new cars. You just didn't notice because your brain filters out a simply enormous percentage of the world.
Frankly, most of the world doesn't intersect with you in any really personal manner (although the headlines keep you in a constant, irrational panic utilizing the same mechanisms — a post for another day), and therefore your mind filters most of it out unless you take some particularly proactive steps to notice something. There are a million beautiful sunsets you don't "see" for every one you consciously decide to notice.
This filtering isn't a bad thing. It essentially keeps your brain/memory from overloading and every extreme-data-density second of life from burying you in nonessentials you don't need to survive and/or spread some genetic material around.
These filtered bits of data:
(a) aren't part of your life; and,
(b) don't have anything to do with whether you'll survive or not.These two things are pretty much the entire job that your brain was designed for in the first place. All the extra crapola you use it for are just emergent properties that accidentally come with this complex system and were beneficial or benign enough to not be flushed down Darwin's toilet.
Anyhow, suddenly over-noticing a thing you hadn't noticed before is a well known phenomenon that's happened in one version or another to practically everyone. Something new has intersected your life and is maintained as a new memory up in front in your mind until you sort out whether it's a threat or not. You will see every instance of it until you get used to it being part of your personal world.
This may take seconds or days during which your mind continues to "see" every instance of this new thing until it's fully integrated into your personal gestalt. Your brain evaluates each instance of this new "thing" that it runs across and will eventually assign a threat/importance level to it. After that, it will again begin filtering out the bazillion times per day you continue to see/hear it when your brain's comfortable with knowing under what circumstances to not bother noticing it anymore.
So, I ran across this YouTube video a couple of weeks ago, and immediately thought of someone who needed to hear it. Then another. Then several. Turns out that in my life, the number of people who needed to hear it because of this and that and the other things going on in their lives is more than I thought.
More than I'd noticed, to be more accurate, since in truth I'd never spared the matter any actual thought. Anyhow, now that I'm aware of this shiny new thing, I wonder if there are more people generally who need to hear it just this second. I suspect so. I suspect some may read this blog.
Or, my survival brain may just be overestimating the importance of the confluence of finding this silly video and literally having talked to someone who needed it only moments before.
(shrug) Who knows. No one credits brains with having that much of a grasp on the real world. But, before it fades again, filtered out of my active memory into lower-ranking and more manageable background noise, here it is for any who need it. Or don't:
In Our Next Episode: Well, this one was going to be about writer's tools. You see how THAT went. Maybe the next one...I'm in Florida for a couple of weeks doing a thing. So there should be time...
I was talking about the filtering thing with a friend the otter week. I notice more BMWs doing stupids on the road; she notices more of a different car. That's just one example of many filters. Since a couple of peeps have mentioned it, I've been noticing more often when customers ahead of me refuse to properly move up in the line and it's even more annoying than it was before. But there was a time I never paid attention to this at all... yet it was still happening! People must have been doing it just as frequently, but it was filtered out in favor of something else, perhaps magazine covers. I rarely pay attention to those now.
ReplyDeleteI complain a lot on my blog; it's one way of getting attention/responses. There are others, such as posting a lot of personal photos or talking about sex, music, politics, celeb gossip. But complaining gets people to relate and commiserate. They're drawn in and then they'll like and comment. It's pretty standard. I'm not as comfy with the other ways of getting attention in public. :)