Your brain does a lot behind the scenes to get stuff done and keep you alive. It will edit your reality before you have any idea it's been done. Do the next 3 exercises and you'll see how fast your autopilot kicks in.
Read the below and count every "F" you see.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
How many F's did you count?
Most people only count 3. Your brain decided "of" wasn't worth tracking as a "word" and quietly edited it out of what you were seeing. It's a function word, it happens to contain an F, but your brain pre-processed the sentence and categorized "of" as structural filler before you even consciously read it. So it got filtered. You didn't choose that. Your brain made an executive decision about your reality and didn't bother telling you. That's not a reading error. That's your autopilot deciding what counts and what doesn't, faster than you can think.
Take a look at these 2 lines. Which one appears longer to you?
Your brain saw the arrowheads and applied depth perception rules (the same rules it uses to judge distance in the real world) to a completely flat image. Whether it was appropriate or not, it just ran the program. It always runs the program, whether you know it or not and whether or not you agree with it.
Before you start, here's what's actually happening.
Reading is so automatic your brain can't turn it off. It learned the skill, got really good at it, and now it just runs, faster than conscious thought. In the upcoming exercise, you'll be asked to read, and when the word and the ink color disagree, you'll find a bit of a "glitch" happen. The reading system wins because you've done it so much, it's automatic. On autopilot. Your prefrontal cortex has to physically and intentionally override your autopilot to get the right answer out.
That need to override and the process of sorting it out is what you'll feel. You'll want to say one word but your brain will want to say another. That half-second where you almost say the wrong thing is two neural systems crashing into each other. It's called cognitive interference, and you're about to feel it happen.
Two parts. First, a warm-up where the words and colors match. Then we're gonna get a little interference going so you can feel it.
Read each word's ink color out loud, row by row, as fast as you can. Not the word. The color it's written in.
Part 1 was smooth because both systems gave you the same answer so you could run on autopilot.
Part 2 was harder because your reading program got there first every single time and your prefrontal cortex had to slam the brakes because you knew you weren't supposed to be reading the word itself.
That hesitation and the near-miss where the wrong word almost came out is cognitive interference. It runs on a lot more than color naming or reading. It runs on every habitual thought pattern, automatic emotional reaction, and default assumption you've got. Your brain's trained programs are faster than your intentions. Every time. That's just how the hardware works.
Think about the last time you snapped at someone and regretted it, talked yourself out of something before you'd even fully considered it, procrastinated or sabotaged yourself, assumed you knew how a conversation was going to go before it even started, or said "I always do this" with zero evidence that you always do it.
All of that was your autopilot running a program it's been running for years, faster than you could consciously catch it.
Your brain makes somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 decisions a day. You're consciously aware of maybe 70 to 90 of them. Think about how many things you've already decided today without realizing it.
The Oh Sh!t Tool Kit will teach you how to start catching the autopilot (and you can get less stressed in the meantime!) Get yours free when you join the ShiftList!
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