Dr. Yvonne Oswald explains how your mind filters reality: only 10% of processing is conscious while 90% is unconscious. Your beliefs, language, and childhood experiences act as filters that delete, distort, and generalize the millions of data points you encounter daily. Emotions reshape how you remember events, which is why eyewitnesses see the same moment completely differently.
Hello, this is Dr. Yvonne Oswald Oswald Oswald. I would like to tell you about how your conscious mind works. Your conscious mind has very few resources, actually. It's supposed to be 10% of your ability to perceive things, and 90% is supposed to be your unconscious. Your unconscious mind does an amazing job. It brings in 2 million pieces of information every second. Puts them into groups of 126, and then you're only aware of 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information coming in every second. You take that information in through your 5 senses— what you can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste— and it also gets filtered through different, uh, programs that you've had running since the day you were born or before. It filters through your beliefs and values. It goes through your language, your self-talk, your attitudes, and your memories, and time and space and energy. So all those filters are in place. Usually the filters come in place after 7 years old, and that's really— before 7 is when you're, you're like a sponge taking in everything that's been given to you with no idea of filtering it. After 7, it starts to filter a little bit. So a 5-year-old, if you go to a 5-year-old and say, 'I saw a spaceship yesterday,' the 5-year-old will go, 'Wow, can I see the spaceship too?' If you said that to a 7-year-old, the 7-year-old will go, 'Hmm, you've been watching too much TV, Mom.' Right? So we get that ability to dissociate and find different ways to look at things and analyze things after 7. What is very interesting is the meta-program that it runs through. That the information runs through. The metaprogram are literally the things you delete, distort, and generalize. So generalization is something we do for efficiency. If you're walking along and you see a little animal on four legs with a little tail wagging, you know it's a dog. And then you can get specific and say what kind of dog it is. A huge amount of information is deleted. So if you were to pick up all the information that's going on, it would be just chaos. So much of the information is deleted The most important thing as far as I'm concerned to do with emotions is what is distorted. Because if you take in information about a chair, a table, etc., and it just, you know, when you go to retrieve it, it comes back as a chair, a table. However, if you store a memory that has emotions attached to it, when it comes back it will be different because it has a different association with it. So thinking about chair and table is different than thinking about mother, father, child relationship, etc. The way to realize this is, it's very interesting. Years ago, I lived in a house with 9 people, and we heard a crash of glass, and I suddenly said, 'Oh my gosh, what is it?' We all ran to the top of the stairs, and as we looked down at the front door, a hand came through the front door, and this man opened the door and stood there, and we all went, "Ahh!" and he went, "Ahh!" and he ran, and we went running after him down the road because there were 9 of us, so, you know, we were okay with that. And when the police came and said, you know, he escaped, and when the police came, the policeman said, "What did he look like?" "Well, he was black, he was white, he was Chinese, he had a hat on, he had a coat on, no, he had some jeans on, he had all kinds of things that he didn't have on." And what was really interesting, the policeman just said, you know what, he said eyewitness accounts, he said forget it, you'll never find him, he disappeared into the houses. What's very interesting about that is we had projected onto this man everything that we were afraid of. Mine was one of those rockers from the '60s in his leather jacket with, you know, his long hair and everything, because I was pretty afraid of them in those days. And, uh, very interesting that everybody else had their own impression of this man completely. So once you've— once you've absorbed that information, once you've taken in the information, uh, you, you go into a state. You feel sad, happy, whatever the emotion that happens that's associated with the event that's happening. And your unconscious mind's job is to sort out that and put it in different file folders so that you— it can be retrieved at a later date. And of course, when you have that state, that emotion happening, your body has physiology changes. So if you're sad, you'll be feeling like this, down. If you're feeling up, your chin will be up. Remember the old 'keep your chin up'? That says literally keep into that— keep in that happy part of your brain where you can really feel optimistic. And very interestingly, that's exactly how your conscious mind works. What I want to do with you is open up your unconscious mind to new resources because all learning and all change is unconscious. You make the changes, the decision to change consciously. So people say to me, "Oh, it took me 12 months to quit smoking." It didn't take 12 months. It took 1 second to quit smoking. It took 12 months to come to the decision to quit smoking. So the unconscious mind is in charge of sorting those into file folders. And the unconscious mind is the only one that learns and that, um, changes. So all learning and all change is unconscious, and confusion precedes learning. So if you're confused anytime, you know you're learning something. This is Dr. Yvonne Oswald Oswald Oswald. Great seeing you. Bye for now.
