Part 3: Narratives, filters and connecting — what the hell is going on with people?

In Part 1 of this series we covered the foundation of this idea, narratives, filters and connecting. In Part 2 we looked into personal narratives. In this part we will understand how it is we process things, what get’s our attention and why.

The Processing Stack Effect

Part of your brain’s self organizing work is to push things down the layers, as you find these little programs useful and reusable, you push them down, down to a point where you can almost without thought, subconsciously perform them. This pushing down allows you to focus other levels of your brain on other things, and allows us to carry out more complex tasks, all at once.

Let’s consider one other aspect to this kind of building up of programs and then pushing them down a stack of conscious engagement. As we go through our early moments of life, we are spending most of our thinking energy high up the stack, practicing and learning those programs that suit us best. Why we do this is because we are seeing patterns of similar and not so similar stimuli, so in addition to creating really useful, programs that can be pushed down and run without thought, we are matching them to specific types of stimuli. This pattern matching is a key to making that really powerful, pushed down stack program…