In my first article "Speed learning and why it is important", I mentioned that i nformation overload is a real problem here on the

21st century. In this article I want to go into how the human brain handles information so that you get some p erspective on why you need to manage the input of information. The human brain is basically divided into two parts. There is the part that deal s with our conscious thoughts. And there is the part that deals with managing yo ur body and does so silently in the background. I want to look at the part that manages your body first. This is part of your brain is known as the unconscious mind. It runs your heart rate your breathing all of your internal organs, it man ages your body temperature and all of the pores on your skin, it manages your di gestive system. There are approximately 200,000,000,000,000 cells in your body. Every one of th ese cells is connected to your brain via your nervous system. The technical term for this is your neurology. So your neurology is all of your brain and all of t he nerve cells that make up your body. Your neurology is so tightly packed that if you were to remove every other cell from your body you would still be recogni sable as you, to a friend. This part of your brain can deal with up to 2,000,000 ,000 bits of information per second as it processes and manages every cell in yo ur body. The part of your brain that you are aware of is called your conscience mind. You r conscious mind is the part of your brain that pays attention to your external world outside of your body and also is aware to some degree of what is going on inside of your body. This part of your brain can handle seven bits of informatio n per second plus or minus 2. Obviously there is a lot more information coming i nto your brain through your senses than nine bits of information per second. The re is an enormous amount of data that youi are not aware of. As a quick exercise I want you to look around the room where you are. Notice eve rything that is red in color. So if there is picture or furniture or ornaments o r flowers or trees just notice what is red and make a note of that. Now tell me what did you see that was green? You see your brain focuses on wha t it is directed to focus on. Your brain has to filter out information which is not relevant to the task is do ing at any given time that is why you saw the red things since I asked you to se e that probably didn't notice green ones. So your brain filters information in three ways. The first way your brain filte rs information is it distorts the information that you are receiving says that i t makes sense in relation to previous experience that it has had. An example of this would be if I was driving down the road when I lived in Thailand and I woul d see a snake on the road in front of me. Sometimes it was a snake and sometimes it was a piece of rope that had fallen off the truck. What I saw depended very much on the conversations I have had earlier that day or that week. If I had bee n speaking to my neighbor Bob it was more likely that I would see a snake. This was because Bob would often tell me about the Cobras he had killed in his back g arden which had come to kill his chickens. The second way that your mind filters information is it deletes things which are not relevant. This is why if you are engrossed in doing something you will ofte n not notice what is going on around you. There was an experiment done with some basketball players and the people watching the game were told to pay attention to only one player. What they did not notice was that one of the players was dre ssed in a gorilla suit. When questioned afterwards they all declared that there had been no one on the court in a gorilla suit. It was not until they were shown a video that they actually found that it was true. This is an example of your b rain deleting information.

The third way that your brain filters information is by generalizing. So for exa mple when I was small I first saw something that was known as a chair. I noted t hat it had four Legs and a piece that would support my back when I sat on. Once I had established that this was something that I used to sit down on and that it would take my weight, I never had to work out what a chair was again. I general ized what chairs look like and in most instances they did in fact take my weight . These are the three filters your brain uses to process information. Distortions, deletions and generalizations. Because of these filters sometimes we need to limit the amount of information co ming into our mind as well as the format that it does so in. There is a principl e in NLP called chunking. In simple terms what this means is to break down large bits of information into smaller bite sized amounts. So if you are going to be studying for a Ph.D. in astrophysics you would not plan to finish all of the cou rse on the first day. You would, instead be studying the information in the orde r your tutor or lecturer presented it to you. And by doing it in this way you w ould build up on the previous knowledge, experiments and experience that you had from your study. In my next article I will discuss the importance of language and the way that yo u learn. And no I am not referring to whether it is in English Russian Chinese o r German. I will be talking about the six languages of the brain. They are the o nly languages that you really understand.