Intermission - 2. A milestone in life

I'll be slowing down with my postings for a little while, to maybe 1 per week. Obligations and all that.

Meanwhile......

There is a milestone in life, the one I’m going to talk about now, which is probably the most significant one in your life.

Be under no illusion, ‘significant’ is not all good!

There is a price to pay. The rewards, however, can exceed all expectations.

First, sorry folks, a little science – though in plain English so you don’t need a PhD.


From the very first millisecond our conscious mind clicks into awareness, we become inundated with input, a total overload, and we begin developing mechanisms to help us cope.

The way we learn to see gives a useful example of such a mechanism.

We have specialist cells at the back of our eyes (millions of them), and they react to light – sending signals to our brain.(For the interested - ‘Rods’ detect black and white, ‘cones’ detect colour.)

However, if a light shines on them for too long, they temporarily burn out – which is a ‘bad thing’.

We are not aware of it, but our eyes are constantly vibrating, moving those cells in and out of a specific light wave to protect them. (A simplification here, sorry).

An example of burn out is that glowing ball of light we can still see with eyes shut after staring at the sun. It is a negative image of the sun we stared at, as only the non-burnt out cells are temporarily working (the burnt out ones do kick back into life after a while).

The key point being that we never, ever, see anything clearly, just a cloud of light and dark and colour.

During the early years, we begin interpreting those clouds, using our other senses in the process. E.g. Touch a hard edge of a table, learn to associate that particular cloud with the hard edge of a table. We eventually teach ourselves to ‘see’, to compensate for those vibrating eyes.

Busy bees we become eh.

Too busy when you add in the same ‘associations’ we are building with all of our senses.


To avoid that potential overload, into the frame comes ‘categorisation’.

We continue experiencing a sensation (or sight) until we get just enough information to categorise it, then we stop. Most of the time, we are approximately correct, but illusion occurs when we get it wrong.

Try something. When you are about to see a friend or loved one after a while apart – picture them in your mind. When you meet, truly stare at them - concentrate, compare what you actually see with that memory you recalled. You will spot a hell of a lot of differences. Categorisation stopped you updating the image, and quite a while ago!

Ever wondered why you stop noticing that you are wearing a watch or a ring etc? The signals are still being sent by your nerves, but the brain switches off reception – category identified, signal not required. We filter out the majority of the signals our bodies (including eyes) are sending us, categorised, they are ‘not needed’.

We do the same with our thinking!

We learn to love shoving things into categories and hence not having to think too much more about them. We filter out a lot of thinking.

Here comes the bad news. A mechanism that worked wonders for learning to see with our eyes actually fails miserably when it comes to thinking.

That milestone, one that only a few ever reach, comes from understanding how categorisation is failing us.

We start to resist it.

However, we also then move out of those comfort zones.

The rewards can be immense, but it can also be painful and lonely at times.