Your World of Awareness is Larger than You Think

One of the things I teach in my personal development website is that our awareness of the world around us is vastly broader than we realize. What we are observing and absorbing from the outside world is substantially more detailed and multilayered than we know. We often, for example, develop instant feelings or reactions to people without knowing why. This is because we are interacting with them on many more levels than we realize, and I am not just talking about the reading of commonly known “non-verbal cues”. I am quite sure that the field of psychology has a lot of work still to do in understanding the full extent of the depth of our perceptive abilities.

There is, nevertheless, a great deal of work going on in all sorts of areas with this regard. An excellent study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is a good example of this. It discovered that our sense of touch assists us in our ability to hear what people are saying to us. How is this? Well, we all know how our vision can help us understand what people say to us – by reading lips etc., Professor Bryan Gick and his colleague Donald Derrick, have discovered, however, that in addition to this we also use our sense of touch to interpret conversation.

They had experimental subjects listen to tapes containing sounds like “pa” and “ba”, in an environment with a lot of background noise. Sometimes, the sounds were accompanied by a tiny puff of air against their hand or neck.

It turned out people were better able to identify "pa," sounds when they came with a puff of air. Moreover, when sounds like "ba" were accompanied by a puff, people got confused and often thought they'd actually heard a "pa" sound. This, of course, relates to the fact that sounds like “pa” are normally accompanied by such a puff of air when expressed.

So when interpreting speech we pay attention to the sensations on our skin, as well as the auditory and visual input. Knowing this opens the door to another layer of perception that is going on all the time and that we are usually unaware of.

This kind of thing is going on all the time, including right now. I say right now because, you can do an experiment to validate this fact as you read this. Pause now and bring your awareness to the sensation of the clothes against your skin, and the chair against your bottom…

You have, of course, been having these sensations the whole time but it took your pause and focus to bring them into a conscious awareness. That is how you know that you are taking in so much more than you realize. As a result, there is a storage facility within you that would take a lifetime to fully explore. Yet doing this very thing is the true path to wisdom, that’s why I have made it the focus of my personal development website.

So open your eyes, but that’s only the start.