For our weekly reading this week we were asked to read John Masons “The discipline of Noticing” – But you aren’t particularly interested in that part, what you want to know is what it said.
Well, basically it talked about the different ways in which we can Notice things. For example, a symbol on a door or the song playing in the background. It broke it down into 3 categories
Ordinary Noticing – Seeing something but not necessarily remembering it
Marking – Remembering something well enough that you can later bring it up in conversation
Recording – Taking note of something and recognising its context
The most interesting of the 3 would have to be recording – recording means that you look at a situation and remember it. then the next time something similar occurs you might refer back to the first time, or understand the forces at play. – or quite simply ‘learning’. The most common example of this would be a teacher being asked a question by a student, the teacher would then remember the question and know that students are likely to ask it again, would then next time be able to answer before it is even asked. Geddit?
How do we become noticers?. Well – the article suggested some activities in order to practice noticing. For example, saying a particular phrase every time you pass through a doorway, Or smiling every time you hear the word “fish”. These tasks will be much harder at first – but your brain will slowly become more consistent at noticing them.
Ok – all the boring stuff is done now, Great Success. Now let me tell you what i find interesting – there is a very simmilar concept in learning to Lucid Dream. Lucid dreaming is a subject i have done quite a bit of googling on, for those of you who are wondering ‘what the cushions’ i am talking about – Lucid dreaming is the state where you realise that you are dreaming and control what happens in the dream world. In order to achieve this state you must first become aware that you are dreaming, while you are dreaming. Ohhh Boi, sounds hard – it is. Luckily there are certain things about dreams that we can pick up on, for example we will have different numbers of fingers, we dont reflect normally in mirrors, light switches wont work, we can hold our breath forever and probably fly. Now all we need to do is notice these things and take control of our dreams, but, we first need to notice them. One theory on lucid dreaming suggests that you train your coinscience to notice these things, you do this by doing reality checks while in your waking life. Reality tests might be as simple as trying a light switch or counting your fingers, the problem is remembering when to do them.
I always tell myself, ok. Tomorrow im going to remember to do reality checks, but i dont remember, because i have not trained myself to notice. One thing ive tried is making an association with an object, so for example, whenever i pass through my bedroom door – i do a reality check. This worked for about a 5 minute period.
So conclusion, noticing is hard, but given the right amount of commitment it can be achieved…. so im hoping by writing this post i can make you more aware of how many fingers you have.
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