Deletions, Distortions, and Generalizations
Some of you, no doubt, are already familiar with George Miller’s paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Since that article isn’t much of a page turner, let me sum it up in a few sentences. Basically, our conscious minds are only capable of processing seven plus or minus two bits of information at any given time. Anything outside of that becomes more or less too much for the conscious mind to handle. Try it out. Sing a song while you read a book and watch TV, and then plan your weekend too. See how far you get. The point is we are automatically filtering out a ton of information in order to make sense of the world. The unconscious mind is possibly aware of all bits of information, all the time. Who really knows for sure, but certain experiences and experiments indicate that we take in information even during sleep.
People distort reality based on what they want or don’t want to see. If you’re an artist or musician you might imagine a picture in your mind’s eye or hear a tune before you compose it. This is a sort of hallucination, a distortion of reality. There isn’t actually any picture on the canvas or music playing in the room, but we subjectively distort objective reality. Perhaps we stand together watching the sunset on the beach. You’re thinking sailing, I’m thinking limbo at the luau. We’re subjectively experiencing different realities.
Without generalizations the world would be chaos. So we follow certain rules in order to make sense of our world. If you learned how to open up a book, you can probably figure out how to open a different one. If you learned how to ride a bike, you don’t have to learn the process again when you ride a different bike.
Deletions, distortions, and generalizations are filters that help us create our own model of the world. We can’t always consciously choose those filters. Each person filters the world in their own unique way, and consequently we don’t always understand each other, but sometimes assume everyone else is working with the same map we are. There are those rare individuals who take a step back, drop their filters as best as they can, and try to understand another person’s reality without judgement.
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