Your Brain’s Magnificent Highlight Mechanism

How marking the right things might enlighten the senses of your brain.

Before we go on, I’ll tell you one thing:

“Augmented reality has nothing on you!”

Augmented projections are brain assistant tools projected onto your real-world perspective. Augmented projections are not projected by the imagination but rather achieved through digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology.

Understand that your subconscious brain can’t separate the difference between something imaginary and what’s real! Therefore your brain lets you experience dreams so vividly, often so difficult to comprehend whether they are true or not.

Augmented reality is a growing trend among companies involved in mobile computing and business applications. It can assist by trying to simulate something in certain businesses that couldn’t otherwise. Yet, the real danger is hidden in the fact one could rely too much on it, which inhibits your brain’s potential over time.

More and more these days, the world is shifting toward digitalization. And don’t get me wrong, I am pro-digitalization if it’s used to make our lives easier or simpler.

The real question often gets neglected: “Do we need all of this?”

Use your brain and think first.

First of all, digital reliability suppresses your real potential. When you rely on brain assists, you lose the strength of those neural connections that help you to think well.

Augmented reality seems like it’s useful, easy, or handy, but let me tell you:

“You are being hypnotized.”

Hypnotism is real, don’t ignore it

Once you start to understand how your brain works a bit, you’ll easily agree, it’s all about the repetition of input, frequencies, and how you use your brain. I’ll tell you even more, everyone can be hypnotized.

Don’t you believe it? Perfect, because you don’t have to, chances are you’ll be that person who is even more hypnotizable than others.

One of the more simple concepts to understanding hypnosis, it’s a brain thing. You reprogram your bios or, like Freud would tell you, your ID, in a nutshell.

Make sure to understand repetitive behavior to start with. If you want to understand more of this, read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the book has nothing to do with hypnosis per se, but you’ll clearly understand how repetitive behavior will impact your life. Your brain becomes sensitively vulnerable at roughly 21 reps or so.

Habits become integrated, some might need a lot more, but most people will start integrating a habit after 21 tries. Even certain things which you don’t like doing, when you’ve done them with enough repetitions, chances are you might like doing them also.

You’ll often see that online courses also apply this method, 21 lessons or 21 days. I mean, they like you to be addicted to the given concept. Addiction tricks you into believing that something is normal after a certain time. It’s a sort of hypnosis where your brain has you trapped.

Digital media tends to trap you in this magnificent brain game. Let me ask you this:

How often do you check your smartphone? And when you do count the number of times you think and swipe the screen?

Chances are you’ve got your brain hypnotized into the world of addiction. Find it hard to leave the smartphone aside? I am just saying.

Blend into the fact that what you do or read on a repetitive basis might also be the same thing repeatedly.

Sounds familiar?

Once your brain falls into the great trap of hypnosis, you tend to obey whatever is being presented to you. Welcome, you’ve just achieved your robot degree! Since blood is still running through your veins, I will call you a hybrid, but still.

Let’s move further,

If you would like to know if you have hypnotized yourself lately, ask yourself these questions:

Which sentence or word I’ve read the last week, last month, last year, past two years?

• What was on my mind most?
• What triggered my RAS most lately?
• What got me hypnotized to believe everything that’s told?

If you can answer those questions, your brain has been largely subjected to the given trigger.

How does this highlighting thing work?

I am sure you’ve heard about the “Reticular Activating System.”

And if you didn’t, It’s part of a group of neurons located within your brain stem.

RAS’s tremendous force within our brain functioning triggered my awareness a while back, its understanding induced and accelerated my specific learning method to absorb the essential things surrounding us.

“It’s your non-digital assistant!”

You could see it as a filter system that filters out unnecessary information, so the important stuff gets through.

Your RAS helps your brain pick out and highlight the more important elements from your surroundings, which seem important.

Your reticular activating system is a network of neurons located in your brain stem that project anteriorly to the hypothalamus to mediate behavior, both posteriorly to the thalamus and directly to the cortex for activation of awake desynchronized cortical EEG patterns. Your RAS organizes billions of bits of data at any given time.

The overall functions of the reticular formation are modulatory and premotor, involving somatic motor control, cardiovascular control, pain modulation, sleep and consciousness, and habituation.

Some say you trigger this brain system by evaluating the head and neck position by performing visual exercises or meditation.

Although I am very into meditational practices to induce extreme focus and tremendous stress relief, I’m afraid I have to disagree.

I see and experience this as an “biological highlighting” of important impulses which could help you later throughout your day. Another way to state this is that the useless information gets eliminated, the “leftover” or “residue,” as you prefer, will become the highlight.

“Turning your brain on the exact messages you want is a key principle you might want to apply.”

A simple example of this working mechanism could be that you suddenly want to learn more about the functioning of your brain. When you want to learn more about a given subject, you’ll tend to seek more specifically that given subject, both consciously and unconsciously.

Focus and determination will be needed when you put the work into the search.

But there is more,

Searching doesn’t stop where you choose to stop, rather, you’ll pick up extra information through other impulses.

From conversations you have, from things said throughout a podcast, from reading books, from conversations you spot from your surroundings, from commercials along the road. You name it, they will all highlight automatically for you to zoom in and pick up what you can take away from it.

The RAS is why you learn a new word and start hearing it everywhere. It’s why you can cancel out a crowd full of talking people, yet increase the attention on the specific sound field when someone pronounces your name or something that at least sounds like it.

Another thing more visible is the new car you’ve bought!

You’ve just bought a car, a different brand from what you drove before. Let’s take a “Red” Tesla Model S. A car that wasn’t that noticeable for you before might suddenly be more highlighted by your brain now. The chances are that you spot them more often. The mechanism that induces those highlights within your brain is the reticular activating system.

Your brain picks the more important content you’ve selected before; it highlights your awareness of that pre-selected subject.

Learn to use it to your advantage, and a special automatic learning process starts to kick into play.

I’ll tell you more, it’s not limited to one thing! You can select multiple interests you would like your brain to highlight.

When your RAS gets triggered by content involving brain triggers or reticular activating system information in the next few days, you might think back at this post you were reading.

Chances are your RAS was triggered by either the word “BRAIN” or seemingly interesting content (to you) written in this post. Your RAS takes what you focus on and creates a filter for it. It then sifts through the data and presents only the important pieces. All of this happens within your brain unconsciously, of course.

“Your RAS seeks information that validates your beliefs.”

Moreover, it filters the world through the parameters you give it, so you are in control of your ras. When you understand the underlying principle, which I hope to get right in this post here, you’ll find it easier to use as to yout desire.

Your beliefs shape those parameters. If you think you are bad at something, you probably will be. If you believe your work is efficient, you most likely do. Your RAS helps you to envision your aim. See what you want to see, and in doing so, it influences your actions.

Another way to state this is that it significantly influences your epigenetics. And while we mention epigenetics over here, we are getting back into a loop that involves the ground rules of hypnosis.

In that sense, I’ve got the notion that RAS, transcripts information from the conscious to the subconscious mind. Your reticular activating system’s base function is regulating arousal and sleep−wake transitions. This can indicate the role of data transition or data-regulative function from the conscious to the subconscious mind during dreams.

You can train your RAS by taking your subconscious thoughts and connecting them to your conscious thoughts. Focus on your goals, and your RAS will reveal the people, information, and opportunities that help you achieve them. Your RAS will make sure your actions influence everything that needs to be influenced to attract what you need. Once you become more aware of this, you’ll be as surprised as me when you comprehend how this magnificent mechanism works.

A powerful way to use it is whenever you are in a negative spiral, which isn’t too hard to get into these days.

Separate yourself for a minute and tell yourself to “focus on positive elements and thoughts.” Tell this to yourself a couple of times until the habit gets integrated. You know what I mean, tell it to yourself until that mad inner voice keeps on repeating it to yourself.

And voila, you’ll find that suddenly you’ve gained a bit of momentum into a positive sphere.

his is something that people who are depressed are not aware of, shamefully. Call it magic or awareness. There is no denying that this is a great tool. Shift of your location to a place where you like to be will already perform miracles which can make it easier to use your RAS tool.

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle-

Hypnosis sometimes has the power not to change something directly or immediately visible, but rather to reprogram a base rule that induces you to take small incremental actions that lead to the desired outcome over time.

If you want to magnify the effect and direct your RAS, I would say:

“know what you want to learn, or know and repeat it until it becomes your standard program.”

Your brain looks out for your best interests, so abuse this fully to your advantage.

Induce your assistant to highlight what matters most in life, and neglect the irrelevant time wasters of life. They surround us in masses. Try to dodge them as much as possible!

RAS can make you feel self-motivated, Boost your learning by focusing on what’s important to you. And even when you sleep, it does miracles by it’s stealth way of communicating inside your brain.

Absorb, Read, Write, Sleep, Exercise, Thrive!

Thanks for reading this post! hopefully, your reticular activating system didn’t get overstimulated here, try and use this magnificent tool to your advantage!

P.S.: I’m a firm believer in building a prosilient mind, and like to inspire by writing.

Some of my writings are about: Sleep & Dreams/Writing tips/Life lessons/Mental Health/Circadian Rhythm/Submarine Power Cables.

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