One event. Multiple Stories. Why? pt2

Because of the tint applied to our vision there are things that happened that I will not have seen but you will and vice versa. And there are things that happened that neither of us will have seen.

Finally and probably the biggest one of them all is generalization. Life is complex and intricate. We would run out of time and get nothing done if every time we spoke about an event we started from the beginning and filled in every single detail of what happened.

For example, I can tell you I made a sandwich. Or I can tell you each step involved in making my lunch, every ingredient that went into it, where I found each one, how I decided what went into it and what did not, and how it compared with other sandwiches, that I have eaten. All of that data is relevant and I might share it once, but not every time I make or eat a sandwich, because I know you don't care about most of those things and through your own process of deleting, distorting and generalizing, most of what you are going to remember is that I told you a story about a sandwich.

Each day is made up of thousands of such events. Our mind breaks these complex sequences of events down to the most important most relevant details and generalizes the whole experience into the simplest to remember.

To sum up, we actually destroy the truth and replace it with a similar but much more convenient lie. And that is why one event with multiple witnesses will have multiple different stories, depending on who is called to task to tell the story.

Through the use of recording devices we can often get a more clear picture of things and that is one way of getting to the truth. But is is also possible for us to modify the delete,distort and generalization process so that our own story is closer to the truth. In fact, that is part of what self empowerment is about, being more conscious of what is going on around you, being better at observing and remembering what you experience. It does take conscious effort and will but I think it is worth it.

It is my personal mission in life to make my experience, my memory of everything that happens to me  be as close to the truth as possible as often as possible. Being able to tell the truth about something when asked what happened is important to me. Does it matter to you?

If it does, then make a new decision for yourself. Starting today do everything in your power to be more conscious of things that are going on around you. Be more present and aware of things as they actually happen. Make a conscious effort to remember things in as vivid of detail as possible. It may not happen immediately, but over time you should get better at recalling what actually happened.

Who knows? Maybe one day seven or eight out of ten people might actually be able to tell the same exact story about an event and have it be the truth.

One event. Multiple Stories. Why? pt1

Whenever there is some dramatic event, a fire or let's say a robbery, after the fact the authorities get statements from as many witnesses as possible. They are trying to piece together exactly what happened. But, have you ever noticed that if ten different people are all separately asked to tell exactly what they remember, you end up with ten different stories? And sometimes some of them are wildly different from each other.

Is it because people are trying to cover up what happened, out of guilt or fear that they may somehow unknowingly be involved in what's going on? Maybe some of the witnesses are pathological liars that couldn't tell the truth if their lives depended on it. Or maybe one of the witnesses is the actual culprit responsible for the crime. Are powerful aliens bending the space time continuum and causing all those different people to experience the same event in different ways?

While one of those things may occasionally be true, its not the most common reason that ten different people who witnessed what happened will have ten different stories. And actually the alien theory is closest to what normally happens, except we as individuals are the aliens.

Don't go calling the funny farm on me just yet. I promise a somewhat reasonable explanation if you'll just hear me out. In order to explain how this works first requires some insight into how we as humans function.

There is a lot going on around us all day everyday. In fact, our brains take in billions of bits of data per second, through our five basic senses. There is so much going on that we literally cannot process all of it at once. We would go insane and have zero focus if we tried to absorb it all. So, to make the process easier for us, our subconscious minds edit events to make them more manageable.

The way this happens is in three separate stages. We delete, distort and generalize. I'm listing them in this order but it happens kind of all at once with no real rhyme or reason for which happens in which order.

First, things that our minds tag as not important bits of data our brains block out. The data is still technically there within our minds, but we don't remember it upon casual recall.

Second we distort what actually happened. This is where things go kind of sideways and tend to get weird. Each one of us has a certain way we view the world due to our experiences up until this point. It includes what we think is normal, what we think is okay or not okay and really how we perceive everything.

Imagine your point of view as a set of rose hued glasses and my point of view as blue colored glasses. If you and I each are asked to tell about the same event, my story will be skewed by the blue tinge everything has and yours will be skewed by the red tinge that yours have.