This short version of the article by no means goes anywhere near competing with the full length version. In fact, most concepts and explanations are left entirely out of this version, so I highly recommend reading the real thing below. I wrote this only for those impatient people that wanted to get some quick value out of it, instead of them not having read it at all. So again, please read the main article in order to gain a much more indepth understanding of the subject, including the subjects not even discussed in this short version.
Humans are survival machines created for the benefit of our genes, in order to increase the probability of our two purposes in life, survival and replication. The biological machine (Human Body & Mind) that our genes have built to house them, does not carry out the orders (Survival & Replication) of our genes directly. In other words, you and I don't consciously receive instructions from our genes on what to do, how to act or behave. Instead, we carry out orders from our genes indirectly, through the sensations (Emotions) of "Pleasure and Pain." It is through these two sensations, of which there are many manifestations and intensities that we obey our genes. Every action is driven by these two unseen forces, to avoid pain and to gain pleasure. It just so happens that most of the situations that threaten the survival and replication of our genes is associated with pain (Damage to our body, in which the genes reside within.) and most situations that increase the survival and replication of our genes have been associated with pleasure (Food, Drink, Money, Protection, Sexual Intercourse).
Over millions of years, our bodies have evolved from simple molecules to what you and I see in the mirror today. Your body contains what we call the "Subconscious Mind," which consists of the "Brain" and "Nervous System." Our sensations of pleasure and pain stem from the brain and nervous system. Natural selection has favored the brain and nervous system because it significantly enhances our ability to respond to external stimuli in super fast speeds, gives us the ability to predict outcomes, allows us to multitask efficiently and other superior brain functions, essentially allowing our genes a greater probability of survival and replication.
Your subconscious, or your nervous system is the actual biological location of everything important to you, everything from your skills, to your knowledge, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, experiences, memories, programmed reactions, emotional responses and even physiological data. Each piece of data, from your skill of tying a shoes to your ability to read is a neural network located inside our nervous system, and our body constantly draws on this data in order to complete even the simplest of tasks. Each neural network was formed through both emotional intensity and repetition. When building a skill, with enough emotional intensity and repetition, (Practice) your neural network for the activity will get stronger and stronger until you master the skill.
Our five sensory input channels Visual, (Sight) Auditory, (Hearing) Kinesthetic, (Touch) Olfactory (Smell) and Gustatory (Taste) are constantly being bombarded with 2,000,000 bits of information about the external world every second of every day. Our subconscious mind can process 40,000 bits of this data a second, where our conscious mind can process only 134 bits a second. What happens to the remainder of the 2,000,000 bits of data that isn't processed by our brain and nervous system? It's filtered out by our "Reticular Activating System" (RAS). The RAS is a part of the brain and nervous system, located in the brain stem. A loose network of neurons and neural networks running through the brain stem make up the RAS. The RAS filters through these 2,000,000 bits of sensory data according to what's important or not important to you, in other words, what's valuable or not. The RAS knows what's valuable and not valuable to you, because that information about you is already ingrained in your nervous system in the form of your neural networks, networks for all your beliefs, values, memories, experiences, etc...
So the RAS uses the nervous system as a filter on our perception of the world. Take a first time driver for example. The first time you drove, you relied mostly on your conscious mind to take in and interpret all that data coming in through your senses, which is why you made so many mistakes. It was too much data for your conscious mind to handle all at once. You had no neural network built up in your nervous system for the behavior of driving. Only after much repetition and emotional intensity was the behavior of driving burned into your subconscious mind and nervous system. Only after this networks creation could you drive without much conscious effort, and this is because you were now relying on "Subconscious Perception." Your RAS was now drawing on your nervous system to filter out all the data that wasn't important to driving and allowing only the data that was important to driving to influence your behavior. The RAS uses your nervous system in three different processes, called "Generalization," "Distortion" and "Deletion."
Another way of explaining the neural networks in your nervous system is to call them filters, since your RAS's three processes use them in order to determine what you focus on, or what's most valuable to you as a person, essentially what specifically you generalize, delete and distort. Out of 2,000,000 bits of data, only what's important to you is taken and used. The rest is filtered out and not used. Why does the data coming from the external world need to be filtered out in the first place? It needs to be filtered out because humans are completely incapable of processing an amount of data that large.
What you must understand by now is that when I talk about your mental filters, which consist of your habits, beliefs, values, memories, experiences, etc... I am referring exactly to your nervous system. All these filters make up the contents of your nervous system, specifically networks of constantly changing neural connections. One neural network is equal to one belief or one value, etc... The entire nervous system on the other hand, refers to the totality of all your neural networks combined, all your beliefs, all your values, memories, experiences and behaviors.
Again, all mental filters are really just neural networks that have been burned into your brain and nervous system through emotional intensity and repetition. This should lead you to the conclusion that the nervous system is really one giant filter on our perception of the external world. Imagine that your nervous system has a pair of eyes. You see the external world through the filter (Eyes) of your nervous system. In other words, you see the external world through the filter (Eyes) of your beliefs, values, memories, experiences, etc... Not only does your nervous system habitually react to your environment, but it's what tells you what the environment is in the first place. This is what's called subconscious perception. Just think about this and you will realize that's it's true. It's how you really see the world, how you perceive your own reality.
Again, as explained above, there are a number of mental filters the RAS uses, such as Beliefs, Values, Memories, Meta-Programs, Experiences and others. Beliefs and values are by far your most important mental filters, for they determine your success or failure in life as a human being. A belief is a feeling of certainty about something. It's an idea you have with strong evidence to support it that has been burned into your neurology through emotional intensity and repetition by thinking about it over and over again. A belief determines reality for you, what's possible or not for you. On the pleasure and pain spectrum, you could have a positive pleasurable belief that you're going to be a successful millionaire in a short amount of time, or a negative painful limiting belief that you'll never be able to make enough money to enjoy your life. You also have beliefs that determine what you need to do in order to meet your values.
Values on the other hand, are beliefs about what's important to you, what motivates or drives you. I've already explained that our core drives in life are to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Well, our values are simply "Labels" we put on different forms of pain and pleasure. Positive value labels would include love, freedom, food, money, sex, friends, family, security, etc... Negative value labels would include failure, rejection, humiliation, dread, physical pain, etc...
Where do your beliefs and values come from in the first place? The same place all your other neural networks (Filters) originally came from. You didn't choose them. When you are born, your fertile subconscious mind is wide open because none of your higher faculties such as your ability to reason and reject information have developed. As a result, parents, teachers and others in authority can place any information in your subconscious mind and if it is repeated over and over again with emotional intensity, your beliefs and values are formed in the biological form of neural networks in your brain and nervous system. You're like a sponge for information. This is what forms your personality or identity. Beliefs and values are simply the product of other peoples’ habitual ways of thinking taken in by you, as well as through your environment, learned knowledge, experienced events, etc... These mental filters are really just neural networks inside your nervous system and they're drawn on by the three brain processes of your RAS in order to decide which sensory data from the external world to filter out or retain.
After all this excess sensory data is filtered out by your RAS using your nervous system's mental filters, the remaining data is then interpreted and given meaning by forming the data into an "Internal Representation," which is a thought, picture or visual movie brought on by your conscious mind and imagination. Depending on your interpretation of the data, in other words the meaning you apply to this internal representation, it will trigger your "Physiology" (Body Language, Posture, Breathing & Vocal Tonality) and "Emotional State," (Pleasure or Pain) and that will drive your actions or behaviors. This internal re-presentation in your mind of the external world, which was brought together into a coherent form by your brain and nervous system's RAS will activate specific neural networks in your body, which will result in the correct changes in your physiology, emotional state and behavior.
For example, if you were driving and a pedestrian stepped off the curb and into your driving path, your brain and nervous system's RAS would have filtered the event, creating an internal representation in your mind of what the remaining sensory data means to you, the "Evade Pedestrian" neural network is activated, triggering the correct physiology, emotional state (Fear, Which is a Form of Pain) and behavior of swerving the car and missing the pedestrian. The "Evade Pedestrian" neural network has now been burned into your neurology even more, thanks to the emotional intensity of the experience, and should help you out the next time the same thing happens. Simply put without all the technical details, what really happened here is that your brain and nervous system gave meaning to what was happening around you, in this case the meaning was intense pain, and that pain is what allowed you to react fast enough to survive this situation, giving you more time to replicate and pass on your genes another day.
This complex process of filtering the external world according to the contents of your nervous system into a small manageable amount of data that your mind can use to interpret and give meaning to your surroundings is happening every second of every day. It's happening to you right now as you read this. You're filtering the words you see and creating internal representations in your conscious mind about what they mean. This is how human beings are able to perceive the external world around them.
Given this description of the workings of the mind, you can see that what we think we experience as actual reality, isn't reality at all, but only a filtered re-presentation of the external world. Actual reality would be if we were able to process all 2,000,000 bits of data coming in through our senses, instead of only 40,134 bits. This is why everyone in the world has a different set of beliefs, opinions and values than you do, essentially a completely different set of neural networks. If you got into an elevator with a CEO, a Monk and a Christian, each of you would have your own separate reality. I would say the monk doesn't get life because he's abandoned too much of what's pleasurable in this material world. The CEO doesn't think any of us get it because we don't have two vacation homes and a yacht. The Christian looks down on all of us because he knows that Jesus is the only answer. It's like each one of us is living in our own little fantasy world where we're the only one that understands what's really going on and everyone else is wrong.
This subjective illusory reality that our mind creates though is what makes us all unique. If we all took in the total amount of 2,000,000 bits of data, then we'd all see the external world in the same way. Instead, we generalize, distort and delete the information coming in, essentially creating a different map of reality for everyone in the world. No two people in the world generalize, distort and delete this information in exactly the same way, because none of us have the exact same nervous system from which we draw on for our mental filters. We're all looking at a map, not the actual territory. We're all seeing a unique filtered re-presentation of reality in our mind, not the actual external world. This is not to say that facts and truth do not exist. They do, and this is because there is an actual objective reality in existence, but we humans only see a filtered re-presentation of it, which makes it subjective to us.
When evaluating or interpreting the incoming data, what's really happening here is that you're searching for the meaning behind it. You're interpreting the situation to find out what it means to you, whether it means pleasure or pain. Our internal representations in our conscious mind = interpretations on what our sensory data means to us. Once we understand what something means to us (Emotional Response), only then can we do something about it and act (Behavioral Response). Our neuro-associations of pain and pleasure are the meaning we associate to something in our nervous system. Meaning = pleasure or pain. Neuro-associations = pleasure or pain. They are the same thing, just different labels to describe them. Values on the other hand as we've explained before, are only labels for various forms of pleasure or pain. These value labels are just names that we use to describe our neuro-associations to pain and pleasure. For example, you might have a pleasurable neuro-association to the label of success and a painful neuro-association to the label of failure. We've said that we condition our nervous system through repetition and emotional intensity. The neuro-association in this model is emotional intensity, whether pleasure or pain.
The key point to take out of this is that humans are constantly evaluating and interpreting their surroundings by applying meaning (Pleasure or Pain) to everything through their internal representations to their conscious mind. Once a meaning of either pleasure or pain has been applied to something, only then will we respond emotionally and physically to it, only then will we know whether we should move toward it (Pleasure) or away from it (Pain). Once something has been interpreted and given the meaning of either pleasure or pain, repetition will ingrain it into your nervous system, allowing it to act as a new filter to our perception of the world. In future encounters with this particular stimuli, your newly created filter used by your RAS will automatically move you toward or away from it, based on whatever neuro-association you have linked to it. But again, the main point here is that we're "ALWAYS" applying meaning to the world. We're always making new neuro-associations, even if we're just reinforcing ones that already exist and in effect making our neural networks for them stronger. This process never shuts off. It's the way we're built. Because of this, we're constantly creating results and moving ourselves in a direction, whether it's toward or away from something.
If you're trying to convert somebody over to Ron Paul, you have to realize that they're most likely not hearing your complete argument with all of its logic. Their RAS is filtering through your argument and paying attention to the parts that are most valuable or important to them, based on their own beliefs and values. You need to learn to speak their language in order to get through to them, in order for them to pay attention to most of what you say and even get excited about it. You can also use this info to change beliefs or install new values. Installing a positive value linked to Ron Paul as president will ensure that they move toward him and filter through the daily news looking for him and move away from the other candidates, who you made sure to link negative painful values to. You need to come up with your own strategies based on this information for converting others.
Now, as I said before, please read the main article below, because it goes much more indepth than this short version ever could. Hope this helps.
