Have you ever noticed how you can be wearing a watch or item of jewellery and soon after putting it on you don’t notice it’s there? Me too! This is because one of the primary drivers for our sense of touch is change, if you touch anything for long enough your nerves will adjust to it as if it’s not there.
Your mind works similarly, looking for novelty and change, in a world of constant information we are often looking for what’s new and different. That’s not to say we don’t want things to stay the same in relative terms, but we are sorting for change as a primary driver.
The more we notice of things the more interested we become, we start to revel in the details and appreciation of what’s going on and this affects our perceptions on multiple levels. For instance, when we’re driving somewhere new and paying more attention the roads and landscape around us the journey can seem to take longer than when we’re driving a more familiar route.
This is because we begin to only notice a few of the details, we stop looking for more information and instead rely on remembered information more. You can try this yourself next time you’re out on a familiar drive. Try to notice more and more details and see if this affects your perception of time passing.
What we’re noticing affects so much of our experience and informs our sense of reality far more than you might expect. With familiarity comes a certain amount of boredom and a detachment from what might really be going on. We will tend to delete or distort information coming in in favour of what we expect rather than experiencing the actual data.
Having this knowledge can be extremely useful in a number of ways. For instance, if we want to become more interested or passionate about something, starting to home in on the details about it, learning new distinctions and then appreciating those distinctions can improve not only our passion for a subject but motivate us to grow our interest further. Likewise if we stop paying attention to something it’s interest to us tends to wither and die.
So, if you want to see the world anew, it’s important to start to pay attention to the details, revel in the novelty and appreciate the meaningful details along the way. This can be true for anything you want to improve, whether it be a relationship, a hobby, work, or just life in general.
