Your Reticular Activating System, the gateway to achievement.
To succeed in life, be great and achieve greatness, you need to understand how your brain can work for or against you.
Did you know that you can learn to put your mind on autopilot to accomplish your goals and live your desired life?
As human beings, we experience the world around us through our five senses.
We are consistently taking in and processing the information we receive around us.
In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concludes that “we filter around 2 million bits of information per second down to 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information.”
This statement is referring to the concept of the human information processing capacity, which is the amount of information that the human brain can process and retain at a given time.
The key points are:
- You are constantly exposed to a vast amount of information from your surroundings, with your senses picking up around 2 million bits of data per second. Your brain has the demanding task of processing all of this sensory input, filtering through the overwhelming flood of information to make sense of the world around you.
- You can only consciously process and retain a limited amount of information at a time. The statement suggests that this is reduced down to around 7, give or take 2, “chunks” of information that your brain can actively work with.
The idea of “chunks” refers to the notion that the human brain tends to group and organize information into manageable units or “chunks” to make it easier to process and remember. The “7 plus or minus 2” is a well-established psychological finding, known as the “magical number seven” or the “Miller’s law”, which suggests that the average human can only hold 7 (plus or minus 2) distinct items of information in their short-term or working memory at a given time.
In essence, this statement highlights the limited capacity of the human information processing system, and how our brain has to selectively filter and organize the vast amount of sensory input to make it manageable and comprehensible.
This means the data available to your central nervous system will go through a process of deletion, distortion, and generalisation for you to make sense of all the information.
This unimportant data gets filtered out by a bundle of nerves at the core of the brain stem, the control centre, called the Reticular Activating System or RAS for short.
A search and acquire tool.
The Reticular Activating System is a kind of search and acquires tool, and it’s good at finding material in your environment that matches your current interests and focus. It’s the part of your brain that takes care of your focus.
So, just like a bloodhound, you tell it what you’re looking for and off it goes.
It filters out information that is not relevant to you and concentrates on finding what you’ve told it to look for. More importantly, you can train the Reticular Activating System to recognise opportunities, objects, articles, ideas etc., and use it to help accomplish your goals.
The Reticular Activating System is the main reason why goal-setting works.
By writing your goals down and focusing on them, you tell your RAS what information you find important and valuable. There is an incredible amount of processing going on behind the scenes.
Still, the Reticular Activating System is excellent at recognising and using the information to achieve your goals better than you could on a conscious level.
Your Reticular Activating System will start to connect the dots and immediately work to find ways to align yourself with your goals and dreams.
Because the Reticular Activating System is efficient in what it does, you should ensure it is being used to improve and enhance your life; your RAS can inadvertently sabotage your life.
Be Aware of your self-talk.
The Reticular Activating System becomes activated when you set goals and focus on them.
It becomes attune to how you think, how you feel and responds to “inner self-talk”. Be careful what you say to yourself and the thoughts you hold in your mind.
Your thoughts can shape the world in which you live, and they will become your self-fulfilling prophecies.
If you keep telling yourself you can’t drive a car, or you can’t do selling or speak to people, your mind will go to work to make sure you attract only the things. These would be in agreement with what you currently believe.
And therefore, reinforcing your experience of not being able to drive or speak to people.
The Reticular Activating System is a self-filtering system that chooses what you accept and reject based upon your beliefs, values, and prejudices.
So next time you think about why things happen the way they do in your life. Just think about what you are currently focused on: your beliefs about money, work, and relationships?
You may find that you need to change the way you view the things around you and change the things you focus on most in your life.
So in closing – learn to program your RAS to what you would like to manifest into your life.