Weeks later, the teachers agree to exchange notes on the student again. They've both retained their original opinion.
Today, the second teacher decides to sit in with your friend in his class. He sits at the back of the room and takes careful experimental notes on the young boys behavior noting anything that diverges from sitting and being quiet.
At the end of the day, the student had contributed four answers to questions for the class, spoke out of turn once, helped another student once, stopped an argument another time and laughed ridiculously loud once at a joke another student told.
"Did you see him today? The kid was back at it again. He was smarting off and disrupting the class again."
"Actually, he was pretty well behaved."
"You've got to be kidding!"
"No. I recorded everything he did today."
Your friend looked at the record and simply couldn't believe they were talking about the same child.
Your friend saw what he expected while the actual record showed a very different picture of what really happened.
KEYPOINT: You remember what you expect to see.
And don't worry, your friend isn't crazy.... He also looked for everything that was brown and saw what was brown.... and nothing else.
As soon as you have an attitude, opinion or emotional connection to something or someone else, you immediately filter your awareness of that stimulus through those attitudes, opinions and emotions.
It's how the brain operates. It's how the brain must operate or it would see something new and have to start from scratch analyzing what "is" and what causes what attitudes, emotions and opinions.
That would be incredibly time consuming and cause the destruction of the human race. (I'll come back to this.)
Unfortunately as helpful as this "filtering" is in general, it creates a very interesting life for each of us.
FACT ONE: We see what we expect to see.
FACT TWO: We don't see what we don't expect see.
FACT THREE: We see what we are told to look for...and not much else.
This week we found out something even more incredible. When a person drinks a drink of alcohol something amazing happens when it comes to people seeing what you want them to see...
