Filters

Maps of the World

Language can be a huge influencer in our ability to navigate and be resourceful in the world, it can affect our innerworld in ways that are most profound, paint a picture of pure magnificence or a catastrophe of epic proportions, bring us to despair or raise us to heights of ecstasy, and touch our hearts in ways that leave us permanently changed.

The opposite is also true our words can affect others in ways equally profoundly, or not so. You may have had the experience where the person that your talking to is like an alien and you are speaking different languages, and yet sometimes you meet a complete stranger and it’s like you’ve known each other all your life.

This is largely because as we experience the world we build maps to help us navigate the complexity of it. The main reason for this is if we, our minds were exposed to the sheer amount of information that the world has to offer we would be overwhelmed. Can you imagine being aware of your heartbeat, your breathing, the birds and everything else in the world while your trying to relax and watch TV?

This ability is done by filtering, we have three main types of filters, firstly biological filtering, the second social and cultural and thirdly ourselves and our experience.

Firstly our biological filtering shields us from the enormity of the physical world, we are only able to be aware and process a tiny fraction of the soundscape available, the human ear can only process roughly between 20-20000 hertz bandwidth of sound. In the visual realm we can only see a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum and as far as touch goes, the receptors in our body vary widely depending on where they are and the accuracy is profoundly different. Some philosophers and physics scientist believe that we perceive less than five percent of the actual world.

The second filter is social and cultural, pretty much from day one of our lives we are entrained to the way of our people, or who whe are mostly in contact with which shapes the way we think mostly at an unconscious level, which in turn tunes us to what’s important to our lives in the scheme of family, friends and society.

The third filter is our experience of the world, which is shaped as we grow up, there are many experiences good and bad that shape our likes and dislikes, what’s important to us, what’s not. These things colour how we think about things and how our map is made up.

As we grow up these filters become stronger and well worn are help us, and sometimes hinder us depending on the situation, making up our beliefs, values and identity of ourselves and the world.

It is also codified linguistically, you may have had the experience of taking a new subject in school, or going to see lecture of and unfamiliar subject and experiencing a lack of understanding or thinking this is a bunch of gobbydeegoop, this is likely because it is outside of your linguistic map, where even though the same language was being spoken. This is also why you may experience the same thing with people seemingly being from another planet, their experience and way of doing things is so foreign to you that your maps don’t match very well.

So how is this helpful for us as communicators, firstly awareness, most people like fish swimming in the ocean are likely unaware of the water, we are usually totally unaware of our way of doing language, awareness brings into play the ability to not react and then chose a more appropriate way of communicating. Secondly it gives us a choice of changing our way of being.

I hope you have found some value in this post, I am on a mission to help people understand their communication and through that be able to change and empower their own maps of the world and then others.

To your best self!

Steve

1 thought on “Filters

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *