Table of Contents Principals and Practices

Music for Social Emotional Development

You Are The Editor of Your Movie

Editor of Your Movie

Have you ever gone somewhere with other people and had a completely different experience then they did? Same restraunt- or same movie or same walk in the park- one of you was joyful, and the other was miserable?

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Please watch this short video and try to do the exercise as best that you can.

This video helps to illustrate about what we pay attention to and what we don't.

Some neuroscientists have said that we are exposed to 6 million bits of information each second. To manage this immense amount of information, we have to attend to certain things and ignore others.
Depending what we focus on, we can have a very different experience.
In one of the class rooms I was in, there was a certain light that made a small electronic buzz. I spent a lot of time noticing that buzz, and became increasingly irritated, distracted and someone irrate. During a break, I turned to a classmate and was complaining about how outrageous it was to have such disruptive facilities. This classmate no idea what I was talking about and never noticed the sound.

Depending what we pay attention to and what signifance we give events around, we are acting as an editor for our unique movie.

The quote from the The Little Prince:

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye".
Is a beautiful poetic expression and it is now solidly backed by current neurology and psychophysiology! The state of our heart and autonomic nervous system, greatly affects what we are able to perceive and how we are able to respond. In certain states of stress, we move into much more limited selective perception, and cognition. We literally hear and see and sense differently. Our focus of attention shifts. Under stress, many non dominant function go offline.

Here is a good analogy; Think of a ladder, we see thing from one perspective. As we climb up a ladder, the world looks different because we are seeing it from a different perspective.
A big part of 'time in' is what responses do we give to others based not just on who they are and what they are doing, but on were are we on our ladder.

And what we pay attention to is strongly influenced by our emotional state and by our expectations.

In time of stress, the right frontal lobe of the brain is more active. The right frontal lobe has more connections to the amygdala which is a major hub of 'fight and flight' circuits. In this state much of our focus is on what is wrong, what is out of order, and potentially dangerous and what could go wrong. We barely notice what is right and what could go right.

The activating the left frontal lobe of the brain down regulates the amygdala and allows more resources to be allocated to perceive  high levels of order and of possibility. We move to what can we create.

Put simply, the more stressed we are the worse our movie is. Alls that we notice is what is wrong, and what could go wrong.
The more we are in positive emotion, the better our movie is. We can perceive beauty, respond gracefully, and take more of a roll in creating a better movie for others.

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Time In

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