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In my first article "Speed learning and why it is important", I mentioned that information overload is a real problem here on the 21st century. In this articleI want to go into how the human brain handles information so that you get some perspective on why you need to manage the input of information.

The human brain is basically divided into two parts. There is the part that deals with our conscious thoughts. And there is the part that deals with managing your body and does so silently in the background. I want to look at the part thatmanages your body first. This is part of your brain is known as the unconsciousmind. It runs your heart rate your breathing all of your internal organs, it manages your body temperature and all of the pores on your skin, it manages your digestive system.There are approximately 200,000,000,000,000 cells in your body. Every one of these cells is connected to your brain via your nervous system. The technical termfor this is your neurology. So your neurology is all of your brain and all of the nerve cells that make up your body. Your neurology is so tightly packed thatif you were to remove every other cell from your body you would still be recognisable 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 your body.

The part of your brain that you are aware of is called your conscience mind. Your conscious mind is the part of your brain that pays attention to your externalworld 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 information per second plus or minus 2. Obviously there is a lot more information coming into your brain through your senses than nine bits of information per second. There 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 everything that is red in color. So if there is picture or furniture or ornaments or 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 what 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 see that probably didn't notice green ones.

So your brain filters information in three ways. The first way your brain filters information is it distorts the information that you are receiving says that it makes sense in relation to previous experience that it has had. An example ofthis would be if I was driving down the road when I lived in Thailand and I would see a snake on the road in front of me. Sometimes it was a snake and sometimesit was a piece of rope that had fallen off the truck. What I saw depended verymuch on the conversations I have had earlier that day or that week. If I had been speaking to my neighbor Bob it was more likely that I would see a snake. Thiswas because Bob would often tell me about the Cobras he had killed in his back garden which had come to kill his chickens.

The second way that your mind filters information is it deletes things which arenot relevant. This is why if you are engrossed in doing something you will often not notice what is going on around you. There was an experiment done with somebasketball players and the people watching the game were told to pay attentionto only one player. What they did not notice was that one of the players was dressed in a gorilla suit. When questioned afterwards they all declared that therehad been no one on the court in a gorilla suit. It was not until they were showna video that they actually found that it was true. This is an example of your brain deleting information.

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The third way that your brain filters information is by generalizing. So for example when I was small I first saw something that was known as a chair. I noted that it had four Legs and a piece that would support my back when I sat on. OnceI had established that this was something that I used to sit down on and that itwould take my weight, I never had to work out what a chair was again. I generalized 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 coming into our mind as well as the format that it does so in. There is a principle in NLP called chunking. In simple terms what this means is to break down largebits of information into smaller bite sized amounts. So if you are going to bestudying for a Ph.D. in astrophysics you would not plan to finish all of the course on the first day. You would, instead be studying the information in the order your tutor or lecturer presented it to you. And by doing it in this way you would build up on the previous knowledge, experiments and experience that you hadfrom your study.

In my next article I will discuss the importance of language and the way that you 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 only languages that you really understand.