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Useful Thinking is a weekly practice for your mind, hosted by clinical professor and mind coach Laura. Each episode works the fundamentals of how your brain actually operates: your mental patterns, your identity, your limiting beliefs, your subconscious wiring. You'll learn practical tools to direct your attention, filter out the noise, and think with more clarity and power. This is mindset work for people who want science-backed strategies for real personal growth. Think of it as a gym for your mind. Show up weekly and master the one skill that will impact every other area of your life.
Welcome back to Useful Thinking.
I'm Laura, and this is your
dedicated space to engage in a
weekly practice, a deliberate
practice for training your mind.
I do this work because I believe
that learning to direct your own
attention, learning how to command
your own consciousness, to think
with a purpose and on purpose.
Rather than being pulled and led
by whatever is diverting your
attention, that ability is the most
important skill any one of us can be
working on and developing right now.
And I'm endlessly fascinated by how
the brain makes all of that possible.
So thank you for being here.
Let's get into it.
So, as you know by now, I like to set
an intention at the beginning of every
episode, and today my intention is that
you will understand the mechanism inside
your brain that is deciding what you
get to perceive about your own reality.
Sound sounds like a big claim, and
it is by the end of this episode,
you're going to experience.
This mechanism working
on you in real time.
Now, a lot of you may have
already heard of the reticular
activating system, the RAS.
It's become a pretty popular concept
in the personal development world,
and if you've heard of it, great, but
I think most people have heard what
I call the surface level version.
The version that goes something
like, focus on what you want and
then you'll start to see more of it.
And that is true, that is entirely
true, but I think it's a fraction of
what the RAS actually does and what it
means for how you experience your life.
So even if you think you
already know all about it.
Stay with me on this episode because
I'm going to take you deeper than
the version most people talk about
or walk around thinking about.
I was really tempted to give you
everything about the RAS in one
episode to do a full on deep dive.
I had the whole thing mapped out, but then
I really thought about it and I realized
that would be working against everything
we have been practicing together.
This is one of those concepts that
has layers, and if I dump it on you
all at once, even though it's gonna
feel good, your brain is going to end
up compressing it and do something
that it thinks it can comprehend and
understand, and then you lose the depth.
So we're gonna do this in two parts.
This episode is all about understanding
what the RAS is and why it exists.
Next week is about how to actively work
with it and give it new instructions.
You're gonna process this much
more efficiently this way.
I want you to trust that structure.
So let's start with why the
RAS exists in the first place.
At any given moment, there
is an unimaginable amount of
data available to your brain.
Right now sensory information is flooding
into your system from every direction.
You've got light, sound, temperature,
pressure, movement, smell,
texture, spatial orientation.
Your brain is receiving millions
of signals every single second,
and it has the a job of taking
that information in and deciding.
What you need to become consciously
aware of because it is biologically
impossible for your conscious mind
to be aware of absolutely everything
that is happening around you at once.
Your system would overload.
So your brain has a gatekeeper,
a filter that sits between all
of that incoming data and your
conscious awareness that filter.
Is the reticular activating system
and its job is to decide what
gets through to your awareness,
what makes it into your conscious
perception and what gets screened out?
What has to be ignored or
filed away as irrelevant?
Think about what this means.
Everything you've ever consciously
experienced has been filtered first.
Every single thing your brain takes
in a massive amount of raw data, runs
it through the RAS, and then delivers
you a curated version of reality.
And that curated version is what
you experience as true and real.
Nobody has ever seen
unfiltered reality, not once.
How fricking amazing is that, right?
Your entire experience of the
world around you is a construct.
It is your brain's best interpretation
of what is important based on the
filter it is currently running.
And I want you to just sit for a
minute with the scale of what is being
filtered out because it goes way beyond.
Just not noticing things
in your visual field.
There are sound frequencies that exist all
around you right now that your ears are
not detecting, you are not hearing them.
Maybe your dog can hear it, or
we know that bats navigate with
these signals so they're real.
Those sound frequencies are
real and they are present, but
you will never perceive them.
There are wavelengths of light hitting
your body right now that your eyes
cannot process infrared ultraviolet,
right there are physically there.
You cannot see them though.
For all we know, the actual physical
world might look and sound vastly
different from what we experience
it to look and sound like.
We are only perceiving the sliver
that our biology is equipped to let
through and within that sliver, your
RAS is doing even more filtering.
It is further narrowing what you
are consciously aware of based
on a set of instructions that
have been programmed into it over
the course of your entire life.
Your experiences, your beliefs, your
fears, your desires, your wiring, the
pruning that we talked about in the last
episode, all of that has been programming
your RAS to filter for certain things
and to screen out others, which means
what you believe to be true is largely a
filter set to find evidence of that truth.
What you believe to be true is a filter
set to find evidence of that truth.
If you believe that opportunities are very
hard to come by, your RAS is filtering
for evidence that confirms that and that
that's what it will find everywhere.
If you believe people can't be
trusted, your RAS will surface.
Every micro signal in your
environment that supports that belief.
If you believe that you are not the
kind of person who gets lucky, your RAS
is going to screen out all of the luck
that's happening around you right now.
Just like the ultraviolet light, because
it doesn't match the current filter.
The luck is there.
You just don't have the coding
and the instructions and
the filter to perceive it.
This is why two people can walk through
the exact same experience and come
out the other side with a completely
different version of what happened.
Their filters are set differently.
They are perceiving different slices,
different slivers of the same reality.
Based on what their RAS has
been programmed to let through.
Let's make this tangible
for you right now.
We're gonna do a quick exercise.
If you're somewhere you can
look around, do this with me.
Okay?
If you're driving or walking,
play along with me here.
I want you to take about 30 seconds right
now and start to scan your environment.
I want you to notice.
Every single red thing
that you see, count it.
Keep track of it.
Just start counting as I'm talking
here, scan all the way around you.
Everything.
Whether it's a logo on a package
or a stripe on a piece of clothing
or something in nature, a light.
You see anything?
Start counting everything
red you can find.
Okay, now close your eyes.
Or if you're driving, just stop
scanning and look straight ahead.
How many blue things did you see
while you were hunting for the red?
How many you don't know?
Blue things were there, right?
And you can look around now and
see there are blue things there.
They were right in front of you.
They were right in your visual feel
the entire time, but you didn't have
the instructions to notice them.
So your RAS filtered them out.
It only let the red things come
through to your awareness, because
that was the active instruction.
Everything else got
screened out is irrelevant.
That's your RAS in action.
Okay?
You just experienced exactly how it works.
We gave it an instruction and
it shaped what you perceived.
Okay?
So scale that up to your entire life.
Every belief you carry, every
assumption about who you are
and what's possible for you.
Every pattern we've talked about over
the last couple of episodes, all of that
is feeding instructions to your RAS.
All of it is shaping what you perceive
about yourself, about other people.
About what's available to you
and what is possible for you and
what's even there for you to see.
And here's the part I really
want you to take away.
If there's one thing you take away from
this episode, the things that your RAS is
currently screening out or filtering away
from your awareness, they are still real.
They exist in your physical world.
The opportunities, the evidence that
you're capable of doing something,
the signs that things are working, the
moments of beauty and synchronicity
and connection, success, abundance,
all of that is there right now.
Just like the blue things were
there when you were counting red,
your RAS just doesn't have the
instructions to show them to you yet.
Yet, right?
We're gonna change that next week.
I'm gonna teach you how to actively
give your RAS new instructions, teach
you how to reprogram what it filters
for, so that your perception starts
aligning with the life you're actually
wanting to build instead of the life
your old wiring keeps confirming.
That's gonna be a really
fun episode, and right now.
I wanna activate your RAS in real time.
Consider this your first taste
of what we'll be doing next week.
Yellow flowers, programming
your RAS right now.
To start noticing yellow
flowers for the next week.
Till we do our next episode, you are going
to start to see yellow flowers everywhere.
You're gonna see them in places
you never would've noticed before.
Maybe there's sunflowers, dandelions,
a bouquet of yellow roses, or
those tiny little yellow wild
flowers growing by the sidewalk.
So all those traditional kinds of
yellow flowers that we normally think
of, you're gonna start seeing in your
world, but you also should expect to
start noticing flowers in other places.
Like maybe you see yellow flowers.
Printed on a carton at something at the
grocery store or on a greeting card or
in a painting on someone's wall or on
a billboard as you're driving along.
Or you see a truck with a bumper
sticker that has a yellow flower on it.
You might notice yellow flowers in the
background of a TV show or a movie.
You might see them on someone's phone
case or notice them in a logo somewhere.
You might see the words yellow
flowers typed out somewhere.
You might overhear two people talking
about yellow flowers in a conversation
that has nothing to do with you.
All of that, it counts because I
just gave your RAS and instruction.
It's going to go to work.
Finding yellow flowers everywhere.
You cannot help but see yellow flowers.
And those yellow flowers have been
there in your world all along.
You go to the same
grocery store every week.
They've always been there.
You just didn't have the
active instruction to
perceive them, but now you do.
So you will be seeing
yellow flowers this week.
That's the RAS.
Now imagine what happens when you start
to give your RAS instructions about
what you want your life to look like.
That's what we're gonna talk about
next week, but as for now, you just
did your weekly mental training,
stunned you showed up for yourself.
Amazing.
If you wanna keep going, please come
join me on substack, where I write a
weekly Deliberate thinking practice.
I'll link to that in the show notes.
Subscribe there to make sure you get a
new article emailed to you each week.
Designed to be a mini practice you
can do right there as you read it.
Okay?
So everything in my world is built
to help you think in a way that
supports you building the exact
kind of life you want to live.
You're learning to work with your mind and
your intention and take ownership of that.
So please go join that right
now if you haven't already.
And please, if you're
enjoying this podcast.
Take a moment to rate and review it.
It really does help the algorithms
of the Internets find more
people that are just like you.
That's exactly who I wanna be talking to.
So thank you again for
showing up to train.
I'll see you next week.