The Reticular Activation System (RAS) is a concept introduced in Tony Robbins' "Awaken the Giant Within". It's not to be confused with the "Reticular Activating System", the part of the brain involved in arousal and motivation in mammals-- though the two are certainly related to each other. The RAS introduced by Robbins is part of the subconscious mind. It's a filter, applied to all the enormous data picked up by our senses every moment of our lives. It's the reason we're not overwhelmed by sensory perceptions. It's how we can tune things out.
Right now, my body's senses are picking up and harvesting so much raw data that if I could browse through it all, it would be incomprehensible. Every tiny fraction of a second, my eyes shoot a snapshot of my surroundings, each one so high-resolution and high-quality that it would take hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes, to store on a harddrive. This continues even when my eyes are closed, even when I'm fast asleep. While I sit here and type, the tastebuds on my tongue tirelessly record the taste of the roof of my mouth, the taste of my teeth. My nose picks up every scent in my office, aromas so faint that I have to struggle to make myself aware of them at all. My ears record the music I'm listening to in such fine detail, I'm liable to be sued by the RIAA. Perhaps most staggering of all the sensations, every inch of my body picks up tactile sensations. My feet "feel" my shoes, my butt feels the chair, my face feels the cool air.
If I had to make sense of the sheer bulk of all this raw data, it would be beyond me. It's a miracle of biology and intelligence that I can make sense of just the monitor in front of me-- and even that, I'm tuning out most of it.
The Reticular Activation System is always at work, deciding what we see and what we don't see. And we can control it, to an extent. The RAS reveals to us what we want to see, and veils that which we aren't interested in. If I enter a room full of things, my attention will be pulled toward whatever is most interesting to me there: a tray of food if I'm hungry; a magazine featuring an article about something I've been contemplating; my girlfriend's face. If you follow me into the room, your attention is liable to fall upon something else entirely. Our raw senses pick up the same data about the same objects, but somehow our focus wanders differently. That's the RAS in action.
I'm sure you've noticed the following phenomenon some time in your life. You discover some new field or discipline of interest, and all of a sudden, it's everywhere you look. An example in my life was the seduction community. Until I was in my early twenties, I had lived a life devoid of romance or even flirting. Then I decided to stop living in denial and take control of my love life. I started reading literature about seduction, and suddenly my whole world changed. Everywhere I looked, I saw seduction, flirting, hot girls to chase, other men chasing them. It's as though I went to bed and then woke up in an alternate reality where all these things exist. The truth is, before, my RAS filtered them out. Looking back now, I can recognize instances where girls were flirting with me before I snapped out of denial, but at the time I simply did not recognize it, at all. In one ear and out the other.
As you expand your interests and turn your eyes toward new things in your world, your RAS opens up and lets more things get through. By learning about new things and being fascinated in new things, you strengthen your conscious mind so that it can handle "more hits" from the RAS. Your consciousness expands to soak up more of your world, and through your eyes, it's as though the world itself is enriched and enhanced.
FURTHER READING
Imaginative Memory
Positive Affirmations
Privileged Information
Right now, my body's senses are picking up and harvesting so much raw data that if I could browse through it all, it would be incomprehensible. Every tiny fraction of a second, my eyes shoot a snapshot of my surroundings, each one so high-resolution and high-quality that it would take hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes, to store on a harddrive. This continues even when my eyes are closed, even when I'm fast asleep. While I sit here and type, the tastebuds on my tongue tirelessly record the taste of the roof of my mouth, the taste of my teeth. My nose picks up every scent in my office, aromas so faint that I have to struggle to make myself aware of them at all. My ears record the music I'm listening to in such fine detail, I'm liable to be sued by the RIAA. Perhaps most staggering of all the sensations, every inch of my body picks up tactile sensations. My feet "feel" my shoes, my butt feels the chair, my face feels the cool air.
If I had to make sense of the sheer bulk of all this raw data, it would be beyond me. It's a miracle of biology and intelligence that I can make sense of just the monitor in front of me-- and even that, I'm tuning out most of it.
The Reticular Activation System is always at work, deciding what we see and what we don't see. And we can control it, to an extent. The RAS reveals to us what we want to see, and veils that which we aren't interested in. If I enter a room full of things, my attention will be pulled toward whatever is most interesting to me there: a tray of food if I'm hungry; a magazine featuring an article about something I've been contemplating; my girlfriend's face. If you follow me into the room, your attention is liable to fall upon something else entirely. Our raw senses pick up the same data about the same objects, but somehow our focus wanders differently. That's the RAS in action.
I'm sure you've noticed the following phenomenon some time in your life. You discover some new field or discipline of interest, and all of a sudden, it's everywhere you look. An example in my life was the seduction community. Until I was in my early twenties, I had lived a life devoid of romance or even flirting. Then I decided to stop living in denial and take control of my love life. I started reading literature about seduction, and suddenly my whole world changed. Everywhere I looked, I saw seduction, flirting, hot girls to chase, other men chasing them. It's as though I went to bed and then woke up in an alternate reality where all these things exist. The truth is, before, my RAS filtered them out. Looking back now, I can recognize instances where girls were flirting with me before I snapped out of denial, but at the time I simply did not recognize it, at all. In one ear and out the other.
As you expand your interests and turn your eyes toward new things in your world, your RAS opens up and lets more things get through. By learning about new things and being fascinated in new things, you strengthen your conscious mind so that it can handle "more hits" from the RAS. Your consciousness expands to soak up more of your world, and through your eyes, it's as though the world itself is enriched and enhanced.
FURTHER READING
Imaginative Memory
Positive Affirmations
Privileged Information
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