Wednesday, January 31, 2007

THOUGHT MOMENTS


I have a tendency to foolishly size up other people or things in a matter of moments and then apply a mental label. I do this in life and I do this on blogs. This process of labeling is largely emotional and usually takes only a fraction of a second. It has much to do with my past life and will surely influence my future. I need to remember that good and bad are merely subjective categories in my mind and not real, and my opinions are usually founded on nothing more than my unreliable feelings. Things and people are not their labels. I will try to remember this.. You might trust your labeling ability and find it convenient to do so, but the problem I have is that I tend to react to my labels rather than the actual person. When that happens, neither of us are really there.
In this wonderful short film by Michael Simon Toon, he explores eye accessing cues. Toon asks random people a series of ten questions and then maps out the eye movements to a 6 point grid. Unfortunately, the grid being used is applied to everyone rather than reformatted to each individual. I'm not sure about his science but it is still fascinating to watch the micro-emotions of the people he questions as they have their "thought moments."