There’s a lot coming your way in a daytime. Estimated, per second you must process up to 400 billion bits of information. Through your senses many useful information comes to you. For instance useful information to save the mortal body in dangerous situations. But you receive also less relevant information. How do you determine what is relevant?
Your senses give you information, but they are also limiting. For we see, hear, feel, smell and taste not all there is. For example, we do not hear very high frequencies. And that’s a good thing, because otherwise you would not only hear dog whistles, but perhaps also the carrier waves of radio, television and mobile phones. Also we cannot hear very low tones. However, we may feel them as vibration.
In terms of smell we lag animals that can smell their prey form a distancel. And also at seeing the animals are superior. An eagle can see eight times sharper than us. From a great height the eagle see a prey the size of a mouse on the ground. Bats can detect objects with a kind of radar system. The colors of the rainbow we can see fine, but outside this spectrum, we see nothing. We do not see the ultraviolet of the sun. We feel the lower frequencies of the infrared as heat, but we don’t see this “light”.
For his survival on earth man has been given an appropriate survival kit of senses and we manage well with it. Our senses give us a limited idea of the world around us and for in everyday life they are okay. If we use technical equipment such as microphones, night vision goggles, radar and electron microscopes then we have in our opinion, the beste perception in the world. However, even with these tools we perceive only part of reality.
That part of reality ensures that we are bombarded with impressions. That load of impressions contains relevant and less relevant information. The brains do not simply process all of those impressions.
From this huge amount of 400 billion bits per second, our brains accept only about 2,000 bits of impressions. The rest is spam. There is a very dense filter in your brains. And this spam filter is formed and maintained by you. Among other things based on your beliefs. And in turn your convictions are based on ancestry, religion, culture, education and experiences. You review the incoming information and puts it in ‘boxes’ that you have created. This can be compared to folders on your hard disk. You review and weigh constantly: trash or not, agree or not, good or bad, etc.
The prehistoric man that used this system thus remembered which animals were dangerous, which sounds indicated danger and what berries were edible. Modern man remembers thus which colors are in fashion this winter, that wasabi is hot and which person was just voted away of a reality TV show.
By filtering and judging we construct our own reality. We assume that what we see and hear and know, is what is there. We create an image of our world better and do not know better. But we miss a lot. For example, we are unable to see the countless mini vibrating energy packets in a table or in our bodies. We do not see how tenuous matter is. If we could see how much empty space is in an atom then we would never dare put anything on the table.
And not only do we see only a part of reality, but it gets even weirder: we also máke our own little reality.