Page 26 - Horizons-February2018

HOW YOUR THOUGHTS

CREATE YOUR REALITY

Discover The Potential Of Your Mind

Pam Grout is the author of 16 books, three plays, a television series, and two iPhone apps. She writes for People
magazine, Cnngo.com, Huffington Post, and her travel blog, www.georgeclooneyslepthere.com. Find out more
about Pam and her out-of-the-box take on life on her website: www.pamgrout.com.

Our brains continually sift through the possibilities The roads and highways of our brains get set up pretty early.
and pick which bits of information to “see” and When we’re born, every possibility exists. Let’s take language,
believe. Out of sheer laziness, the stuff we choose to for example. Within every newborn is the ability to pronounce
perceive—and make no mistake . . . it is a choice—is every sound in every single language. The potential is there for
stuff we already know. It’s stuff we decided on way back the r rolling of the Spanish language.
when. We see, feel, taste, touch, and smell not the real world,
but a drastically condensed version of the world, a version that It’s also there for those guttural German diphthongs. But very
our brains literally concoct. early on, our brains lay down neural pathways that mesh with
the sounds we hear every day, eliminating other sounds from
The rest zooms by without recognition. John Maunsell, a other languages.
neuroscientist at Harvard University, says, “People imagine
they’re seeing what’s really there, but they’re not.” With the possible exception of Barbara Walters, pretty much
everyone who speaks English can pronounce the following
CREATING NEURAL PATHWAYS phrase: “Rolling Rock really rouses Roland Ratinsky.”

Once your brain decides which bits to let in, it builds bridges But when people from China try to learn English, they no
between various nerve cells, interlacing nerve fibers to create longer have the neural pathways to properly say their r’s, so
neural pathways. The average human has 100 billion nerve that’s why “fried rice” becomes “flied lice.” Just so no one
cells, each with innumerable extensions, so different highways thinks I’m ethnocentric, I should probably add that I’ve tried
get built in each brain. The map of neural pathways in your pronouncing some of those guttural German words only to
brain and, say, Johnny Depp’s brain are as different as the discover that my German neural pathways have been shot to
maps of Wisconsin and Rhode Island. hell and back.
Once you get the pathways set up, you quit traveling the rest Perhaps the best example of how your mind creates its own
of the country. Interstate 70 in my home state of Kansas virtual-reality game is the everyday, garden-variety dream.
makes for a perfect metaphor. Believe it or not, Kansas—the When Morley Safer showed up on your doorstep last night
state The Wizard of Oz portrayed in black and white—actually asking all those embarrassing questions, it seemed pretty darn
contains lots of geological landmarks. real. But once the alarm clock went off, Morley and that vir-
tual 60 Minutes interview popped like the flimsy soap bubble
There’s a miniature Grand Canyon in the northwest corner, for it was.
example, and a huge seven-story limestone formation called
Castle Rock near the town of Quinter. But since people travel- CLINGING TO OUR WARPED ILLUSIONS
ing through Kansas rarely leave I-70, nobody has a clue that
these geological formations exist. They’ve literally bypassed Our neural pathways establish reruns of what has gone on
all the beautiful, worthwhile stuff and come to the erroneous before. Like the three-year-old who insists on watching The
conclusion that Kansas is flat and boring. Little Mermaid over and over and over again, we cling to our
warped illusions with a tenacious grip. Get your bloody hands
But it’s not reality. off my illusion! Even though it makes us miserable, we prefer
to place our faith in the disaster we have made.
Like those highway planners who put I-70 on the flattest,
quickest, and easiest route, we build our neural pathways on
the least complicated routes—the ones we’ve traveled so many
times before. But this doesn’t show us reality. Not even close.
We don’t begin to see all that is there—only three and a half
minutes, compared to 821 years. ...continued on page 31

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