In all honestly I’d never even taken any special notice of the word ‘notice’ once at all in my life before reading this weeks reading. I’ve never seen the word come up so many times in a novel, let alone each paragraph of Mason’s piece.

I agree with Mason that we don’t notice most of the stimuli which we encounter in each day, but I think it would be less productive than more to start noticing pens and doorways as he suggests.

I really liked what was said about conversation. In any conversation that I may not be interested in, or having heard a friend say something that I don’t agree with, I often notice my body language change despite my own efforts to seem positive and engaged. It’s something I notice but something I can’t change.

So in a way, noticing personal action might be good but it also might just enhance anxiety. Who knows. I really think I ought to talk to my psychologist about this.

Any reading that needs to be brought up with my psychologist is either very good or very bad. And where is Mr Wilde in all of this?

It is in my practice to interpret readings into my own language and point of view in order to learn, and this is what I took from Mr Mason’s ideas:

• Notice beauty, enhance your creativity.
• Notice new things, interesting things, to enhance creativity.
• Notice the language, spoken and unspoken, of other people, to understand them better for selfish reasons and unselfish reasons.
• Notice yourself, your behaviour, to better yourself.
• Take note of those things that happen that might be of some significance to you in the future, and reflect on them to gain full use of that incident.

I really don’t see what this has to do with my learning though. Self-development, maybe, but learning information, not so much.

I have however noticed myself not noticing things more than usual recently, so I will in the future try to be more ‘mindful’ than ‘mindless.’

The article, Researching Your Own Practice, by John Mason, can be read here.