Saturday, August 10, 2013

It might be disturbing to learn...

that, a complete stranger often needs less than 10 seconds to make non-random inferences about our personality traits, vulnerability and so on... scary, I know.
Thin slicing is a brief silent excerpt of expressive behavior sampled from the behavioral stream. In plain english, it's the first 10 seconds before you open your mouth. 
And why I chose the topic today? Because my thin slicing got a bit of a blur in the last couple of months. My intuition had a bit of a gap, a gap to process what I was seeing. I would like to blame it on stress, the last couple of months have been overwhelming. But the truth is, physical pain can really take it's toll.
I find thin slicing fascinating, intriguing, the most beautiful part about the human brain. People read about human behavior and think that if someone crosses their arms that means they are being closed off, if they are touching their shoulders that means they're southing and so on. Yes, maybe. But if you start looking at arms, your 10 seconds will be up. We control certain aspects of our body language, but.  Our brain has a mind of it's own. You can try and lie with your body all you want. But the honest brain, our emotional center. Can't. So when you choose to be careful with your words so they can't figure you out. Well if they are good at thin slicing, they had you down the first 10 seconds they laid eyes on you. How does it work? I have no fucking idea. You look at something and you just know. The same way you walk into a room and you filter people in and people out, based on where you are at. How many times have we walked into a room, looking for someone and the first person you spot in the crowd was the person we were looking for. It's what you are opened to and how open you are to see.
Phycologists and sociologists through out time have made so many researches on how it works. The human brain is so brilliant and we use so little of it, which is a shame. I wish I could use my brain to it's full capacity, I wish I could read a book or meet a stranger that can show me how to do it. Brilliancy comes with aging, it's a constant search of understanding how things work. If you spend most of your time polishing the surface and looking at it and being content with that, then you will have no need to see what lays beneath it. Some people are happy with that, are happy with what they are told. I'm not and that makes life challenging. We live at a time that there's so much distraction and so much need for material staff that people do not take the time to understand how things work. How we work. And when things get overwhelming they take a pill to numb what makes us human. They spend their lives with the wrong person next to them because it's convinient. Or even worst they had the right person next to them but they chose to give up. I know I'm over thinking today, nothing new there.
LIFE! the most beautiful journey of all. If we were all honest and open then life would have been so beautiful. A beautiful dance, a constant exchange of energy. Sounds beautiful but will that help us evolve? I'd say no, because we evolve through pain. Through touching bottom and finding our way back to the surface.