Category: Mind

When Have You Had A Sudden Change Of Viewpoint?

As humans, we try to be consistent. However, sometimes circumstances lead to a sudden change of perspective. Has this happened to you?

One reason why this sudden change might occur is simply through collecting additional data. You might start out believing, say, that Columbus discovered America. You add more information to the picture, and then finally some piece of data makes you realize that it isn’t true.

Another way is a sudden re-framing of the data you have. An example of this is the move ‘The Sixth Sense’ with its twist ending. The revelation makes you reinterpret what happened all throughout the movie.

Sometimes, you can change your mind just by thinking about the situation. You might just realize — by yourself or with the help of someone else, like a therapist — that you were simply wrong. You never bothered to examine your beliefs, or were blinded by emotion or fear, or some other reason. But suddenly your error is exposed, and it changes how you think.

There are other ways you might change your mind quite suddenly. Has it happened to you? What led to the change? And how did you change the way you think about similar things because of it?

Related questions: What is necessary to change your mind?What beliefs do you have that might be wrong?How do you adopt new ideas?

When Does Something Become An Unhealthy Obsession?

We all have interests. Sometimes, however, an interest can become an obsession that can endanger our mental and emotional well-being.

Obsessive behavior is all too common in our society, from eating disorders to gambling addiction to OCD. There are times we cannot stop our thoughts from damaging our relationships and our very lives.

And yet, obsessions don’t start out as obsessions. They start out as simple interests, the kinds we all have, very naturally, throughout our lives. At some point, however, an interest may undergo a transformation into an unhealthy behavior. We may not be in control of our thoughts, or of our reactions to those thoughts.

How does this change happen? How can you tell if such a thing has happened to you? And if you do manage to recognize it, is there anything you can do to modify your behavior or to lessen the impact on you?

What role does our society play in reinforcing obsessive behavior? And what can we do to proactively reduce the likelihood of an interest become an obsession? Finally, have you every had obsessive thoughts, and if so, what did you do about it?

Related questions: Could everyone benefit from therapy? How does technology influence your emotions? What should you let go of? How are your body and mind intertwined? How do you find peace when you need it?

Why Do We Remember What We Remember?

Memory, and what we happen to remember, is a mysterious thing. No one really knows the details of how memories are formed, physically, in the brain.

Bur apart from the question of the mechanics of memory formation, it is equally mysterious how it is determined exactly what is remembered, and what is quickly forgotten. It would be impossible to remember absolutely everything, so most of us naturally ignoring or forgetting most things going on around us.

But how, then, does our brain decide what to keep and what to discard?

Certainly, we can try to commit certain things to memory. Repetition is a good way to learn something, but it is not very efficient.

But what about those things that just naturally become lodged in our brain? The earworm, for example, that you don’t try to remember, but plays on an endless loop, seemingly by itself. Or perhaps you recall the lyrics of a song you heard once or twice on the radio more than a decade ago, but details from yesterday are already fuzzy.

One oddity is that different people remember different things. One person, for example, might find that people’s names are easy to remember, while another might find that faces are easier to recall. Similarly, some people find it easier to learn directions by the names of streets; others by landmarks on the route.

Have you thought about why a certain passage from a book stays with you, while most of the rest gets forgotten? Or why one song on an album lingers in memory, but the others don’t? You don’t necessarily remember the best bits, but rather those things that, for whatever reason, resonate with you.

Why do we remember what we remember?

Related questions: Does your memory define you? What is the earliest memory you have? How do you want to be remembered?