We Actually See Events in Slow Motion

Our mind processes more than what it observes

Photo by Sourav Mishra From Pexels

The title may seem misleading as we see things as they happen, i.e. they do not occur in slow motion. But our mind processes more than what it observes hence the events that occur could have been faster. Thus, the title.

Let’s say you meet a person named Ram. Ram has long hair and has a dark complexion. His accent also denotes that he is from the northeastern part of India. When you have a conversation with Ram your mind will just not process what Ram is saying and give a relevant response. There will be a part of the mind that would be working parallelly and would be evaluating his various characteristics. Since Ram’s accent denotes he belongs to a particular part of India so you would formulate certain opinions related to the characteristics of people of that area. Maybe those people are short-tempered. The part of the mind that came to this conclusion would then convey the same to the part of the brain that is busy in conversation and suddenly you may start feeling uneasiness.

Analogy to software

In a typical software when input is given for processing there invariably are parts of code that execute in parallel. There definitely is the main thread that handles the main part of the processing while there might be many ‘asynchronous’ methods that execute in parallel. Thus, the software can process more than the basic requirement. These ‘asynchronous’ methods complete their task and convey the result to the main thread which then gives a combined result back to the user.

There may be times when the ‘asynchronous’ methods may take a long time to execute and then the main thread too gets stalled and gives a delayed response. This is analogous to the situation where the part of the brain that is processing some secondary feature of the person gets stuck in some fearful incident that leads the person to lose track of the conversation in which he is involved.

In the example taken earlier if the person talking to Ram has a part of his mind processing his accent and gets stuck in an emotionally charged incident from the past where another person with a similar accent did harm to him then it is analogous to the ‘asynchronous’ methods getting stuck and the part of the mind (main thread) that is processing a response to the conversation items may also be blocked. This leads to long pauses in giving a response.

What to do?

“We simply cannot change the way our mind functions. There will be a part of the mind that will be examining the secondary characteristics of an event and running parallelly to provide extra input to the main part of the mind based on the conclusions that it has derived.”

We simply can ensure that in whichever direction the parallel execution happens it leads to events from the past that are not having an unpleasant emotional charge. To fix it the process of catharsis and the refinement of the inner child have proven to be extremely helpful.

Example: In the example of a conversation with Ram, the part of the mind that runs parallelly gets stuck in a past incident having an unpleasant emotional charge concerning a person with a similar accent. The person should ideally somehow handle that conversation and later apply the process of catharsis to re-experience the past incident and process the emotional charge completely. Then the belief that was responsible for the creation of the unpleasant emotion should be analyzed and replaced with a better belief. An example of the belief that caused pain may be the aggressive nature of the person having the accent. This belief can be replaced with the better belief that generalization is not always good and also aggressiveness need not be condemned but rather dealt with sympathy. The aggressive person is actually in need of help and doesn’t need our hatred.

Conclusion

I hope the way our mind functions justifies the title of this article. Yes, we do see things in slow motion as there is a lot of processing that goes into handling a simple situation. There will be parts of our minds that work in parallel to evaluate a lot more characteristics than what is directly available. This processing in a way impacts the main action and the person may start to feel either uncomfortable or excited. If there is a feeling of uneasiness then the process of catharsis and refinement of the inner child should be applied by the person so that the parallel processing too would not come to negative conclusions. Thus, we can create our response to be much more within our control and ultimately create a life in the way we want it to be.