Look around - what do you see? To our eyes, we appear to see solid objects before us, unchanging in this moment. But this stability is an illusion. Seeing is a creation of our brain. And research at MIT and Berkeley reveals this creation of seeing is an amalgamation of the information arriving at our eyes over the past 12 seconds.
Now take a moment to count: "1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi"… all the way up to 12 Mississippis. How long did you remain focused on the task of counting? Did you drift off during a “Mississippi?” According to research by Matt Killingsworth, 43% of the time our mind wanders or drift off. And where do we drift off to? Research from Amisha Jha reveals we drift into a rumination about ourselves and experience a negative mood.
What do we discover when we combine these findings: our current perception is created over the past 12 seconds; about half of those past 12 seconds we are not even present; during those 5 seconds of mind wandering, we are ruminating about ourselves and feeling depressed. Let’s extrapolate that out to 24 hours - now that sounds like a fun day!
So where can we intervene in this neural process of creating our perceptions of the moment? What aspects of our perceptions are malleable? Or are we doomed to our neural hardware? Mindfulness research demonstrates that even for a beginner to meditation, our capacity to focus is not only easily accessed, but enhanceable. Not only can mindfulness act as software to enhance our capacity to focus, but it also can alter the hardware of our brains. Changes in connection and density of brain structures attributed to focus and compassion occur with a consistent mindfulness practice.
So, with the influence of mindfulness, we can limit our wanderings into self and negativity and arrive at the unfolding moment of these 12 seconds. Welcome to Here-Now (or at least as close as we can get!).
http://www.medicaldaily.com/imperfect-visual-perception-system-how-our-brains-weave-story-out-broken-bits-273528
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perception
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