Welcome to the Best Life University podcast.
I'm Dr.
Lynn Brown,
A counselor and educator.
In this podcast,
I discuss a myriad of topics related to the five dimensions of personal growth,
Mental,
Social,
Spiritual,
Emotional,
And physical.
Thank you so much for listening.
Today's topic is living mindfully in a changing world,
The mind.
The stuff of experiences from moment to moment is concocted for us just below the periphery of awareness in realms of the mind,
Which scan,
Select,
And filter the array of information available from the senses and memory.
The mind is arranged by unseen forces that operate to present us with a constructed reality,
Which we comprehend in its final finished version.
This is kaleidoscopic.
The experience of every moment is unique and unrepeatable,
Writes James Britton in Language and Learning.
He goes on to say,
Until we can group items in it on the basis of their similarity,
We can set up no expectations,
Make no predictions.
Lacking these,
We can make nothing of the present moment.
Perception is interactive,
A construct.
It is not enough for information to flow through the senses.
To make sense of the senses requires a context that organizes the information they convey that leads to its proper meaning.
The packets that organize information and make sense of experiences are schemas,
The building blocks of cognition.
Schemas embody the rules and categories that order raw experiences into coherent meaning.
All knowledge and experience is packaged in schemas.
Some schemas are never speak to strangers,
Marry for money,
Blondes are airheads.
If it can go wrong,
It will,
Murphy's law.
If it's bad,
It's only going to get worse.
If it's too good,
Watch out.
Bad things come in threes and life is tough.
We have become who we are,
Learned what we know by virtue of the schemas we have acquired along the way.
Schemas accrue with time.
The schemas we have at a given point are the end product of our particular private history.
In a sense,
A scheme is like a theory,
An assumption about experience and how it works.
A schema in the words of the cognitive psychologist,
David Rumelhart is a kind of informal,
Private,
Unarticulated theory about the nature of events,
Objects,
Or situations which we face.
The total set of schemas we have available for interpreting our world in a sense contribute to our private story of the nature of reality.
Copyright 2021,
Lynn Baranius Brown.
