Selective Perception
 

I love this quote. It speaks volumes. When you set your mind to something, you begin to see it everywhere you look.

I'll give you an example. My love and I are waaaaay too similar to be natural.

We have the same tastes, we have the same ambitions. Oh yeah.. we also have the same lense perscriptions. I have a fantasy of making out with an elf... well, she has been called an elf before by friends. I've brought up the movies Labyrinth and Requiem For A Dream to her on unrelated subjects, both of which Jennifer Connely is cast in, who she holds a striking resemblance to at many angles. The above quote is from the movie Pi, which we watched one night together before we were a couple. Pi is from the same director of Requiem For A Dream. See where I'm getting at? I think we are similar, so I keep looking for more similarities and coincidences, even the loose ones. It goes on and on.

The mind can convince itself of anything.

Hal, you need to slow down the thinking.

This girl is for you. You already know that. We are all very happy to see our fearless leader in so much amounts of love.

You keep on over-thinking and one day you will wake up alone... trust me on this.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/forumfun/positive8.jpg
j/k by the way ;) I completely agree. It's a very indepth statement.

Asta!!

I dont wanna come off like I'm doubting what I got going. I just wanted to illustrate how true that quote is.

but by trying to illustrate how true the quote is, aren't you slowly becoming obsessed. In fact, it sounds like you are trying to filter everything else out and find arguments to stave this quote.

So it's self-fullfilling...
So, euhm, I dunno what I just proved, apart from the fact that I can confuse myself.

What the King said. Mellow out a little. Think about how lucky you are to have this woman in your life and get on with it.

all perception is selective.
we are bombarded by an astronomical amount of information.
our brains are selective attention devices.
we all select things to attend to based on our previous pattern-recognition cues.
every single thing we perceive - we have selected out from among the maelstrom of possible sensory inputs and conceptual paradigms.
there's no escaping it...
when we notice we are doing it to some degree or another - we are better off than when we do not.

awareness is enlightening. recall learning new words that you've never heard or read before... suddenly they are embedded everywhere....

it's just being aware. and alive.

The mind does allow you to find the similarities and put aside the differences. You will find out how similar you are with a SO when you renovate/decorate a room/home. She wants blue, you want brown - different. You both want a couch and a recliner - similar. You both want curtains, etc... - similar. In the end: "we have very similar tastes." Whatever happened to color? Who remembers, everything else fell into place.

I am not criticizing the "mind", I am just trying to expand on the thought. In any case, I like to think this is how it is intended. You need to have differences to keep things interesting, but not too many to make it difficult. It has seemed to work for us.

Bones, I know you have a point and all, but using furniture selection in a new home is just not the kind of example you should have used. You see, Hal has impeccable taste. I enjoy his taste and do not question it. You're going to have to find something a bit more substantial for us to break up over.

figure it this way: if religion doesn't tear us apart, nothing will. ever.

I would usually never reply to a post from "The Mighty One" but I have been thinking about this on & off for a few weeks now & had intended to start a thread about it.

That whole 216 thing, I can relate, let me explain:
When I was younger my smoking buddies (Im clean now) & I for some reason developed an attatchment to the number 49. There was about 9 of us & the number 49 kept popping up everywhere. On a daily basis one of us would have a story about how they came across the number going about thier daily lives. It was incredible, it was everywhere & we all cracked up laughing whenever we saw the number.

My brother for a few years had an obsession with the number 106, same thing happend to him. 106's everywhere! It became a running joke with him too.

Im a little sketchy about this one but during the 1960/70's there was some LSD guru who did the same thing with the number 23, this guy was pretty famous & loads of people were involved in his 23 thing. In an interview someone said to him that he was fooling people into thinking there was some sort of significance to the number 23 by simply bringing thier attention to the Number 23, as a result people started seeing it everywhere. This guy agreed with him, he had simply "pricked" peoples attention to rummage out occurrances of the digits 2 & 3 together & attatched a meaning to it.

What im trying to say is that perception is reletave. Its a highly personal thing & your brain & mine work in different ways making connectoin after connection every split second.

Youre different, just like everybody else.





ARTelevision: You are one smart guy, I get the impression from alot of your posts that you've got it together in the head department. Much respect.

umm.... Kids and how you want to raise them. While you may acquiese on religion at this point... raising children will have different challenges.

"You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi Wan Kenobi

This may be from Star Wars, but it fits the subject. If you think something is true, it becomes true to you (like the number 216 or 23 popping up everywhere).

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this. I went through a day recently where I just tried to relate everything, at it was incredibly easy. This followed a day where my emotions did the work for me.

The same thing happens when you fall for someone (or get dumped) and everything anyone says or does has incredible significance: song lyrics, all that stuff. That's the psyche for ya...

This thread has split into two parts.

Half are going with my original point... that when you sensationalize something, you begin to find it anywhere you look.

The other half are picking at my relationship, which wasn't really intended, but thanks for your concern.

I think it's all concern. We all love you ;) (even my sort of n00b self) When you ask people questions regarding your relationship, people feel like they have some sort of insite, thereby the right to always give advice. Or something. I lost my train of though again, damnit.

Anyway, your original point.... Theres this guy that I'm pretty much infatuated with. My mind tricks me into thinking every song I hear reminds me of him, every book I read, every movie I rent. And I know it's not the case. Cause I saw those movies, and heard those songs long before I ever knew him.

The human mind is tricky.

Sorry, and your welcome.

the mind can be tooooooo convincing sometimes :|

/me scares myself

i basically agree with everyone that our brain is selective and nowhere is this most apparent than when going through personal matters like relationships. so i guess i don't have much else to add, but i felt compelled to reply anyway :P because i relate a lot to the pi quote. but yeah.. our mind is quite an amazing filtering device. we do this often with our thoughts. that's why brainwashing techniques are actually quite simple. our minds are very impressionable things. and when you confine someone in an isolation tank and deprive them of some basic senses, what they will end up sensing when something IS sensed will be magnified so greatly that it takes over the mind. essentially, it's messing with our filtering system. so you spout propaganda ...mess with their heads... do this until its conditioned and they're brainwashed just like that. so..filtering is normal and needed to survive. when we relate it with things like relationships, its just our brains putting meaning to what we want. things don't just "happen", we make them so.

Magpie0001, thanks.
If I haven't figured out a couple of things by now
it would be my bad.
...School of Hard Knocks grad.

:)

We tend to notice what our brain is drawn to. Just because you didn't notice it before doesn't mean it wasn't there. My wife is a firm believer that butterflies are a sign of something good for her. You see butterfiles everywhere as they are a very popular symbol. I tend to think that people just like the image, so they put it on things. For a long time after I was married, I noticed the things about my wife that made us different without noticing the many more things that made us alike. We had a rough time about 6 years ago and began marital counseling. We each separately took a personality test that showed we were statistically the same in 15 of 16 categories. It was only then that I noticed how true it was. Selective perception is something that happens to everyone.

I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to suggest anything negative. Rather, in my own relationship I have noticed that you have tendency to find alot of things that would suggest that you are compatible (you like chicken fingers too? how about buffalo wings? me too!). Yes there are large issues that have to be handled, but it is the small things that are the glue that keep the relationship in one piece. As far as the furniture reference goes, what I was trying to suggest was that although an initial opinion was different, both sides are able to come to a middle ground or agreement - that is what a relationship does. If you don't have a solid relationship, you may not be willing to compromise/accept as much.

Again sorry if I threw you for a loop. I just was trying to expand on the original "thought" concept. As far as a direct comment on your specific relationship, I just hope that both of you are happy now and stay that way in the future.

And I have no issues over the whole "religion thing", my conern is this: How long is Halx going to keep litespeed a Rookie? You would think he would have some pull around here. Of course there may be some things that he just isn't ready to reveal........