A few years back I moved into a house which was just some 50 metres from a very busy railway line. The first week was horrific. Trains seemed to be coming right through the house. The noise was almost unbearable. But it stopped!

Something similar happened with canaries. We moved into a house next door to avaries full of beautifully singing canaries. It was sheer bliss to hear them. But they stopped singing. What happened?

Have you had the experience of buying a new car and then suddenly become aware of the same model being very popular. Everyone seems to be driving one. Or you buy some new clothes only to discover your new fashion piece is not as unique as you thought.

What's going on?

It's all about how we handle information and interact with our environment. To avoid information overload we become very selective about what we see and hear. There is more going on around us then we can take in and we are programmed to filter out most of it. That seems OK until we are asked to recall something. We then find that our memory seems to let us down.

We all experience the world around us in a very fragmentary, partial selective and incomplete way. None of us ever see the full picture. Just ask people who were involved in the same incident to recall what happened and you will be surprised about what was seen or not seen. There is more going on then what we imagine, or is there?

Not only do we have an incomplete picture of the world, we also invent things to fill in the gaps. This is particularly true of our perception. Our brains become accustomed to seeing things in a preconceived way and when faced with contradictory information either we dismiss it or reconstruct it to make it acceptable or sensible.

We very readily invent our own reality even when the facts suggest otherwise. Seeing is not believing! Check out the following. Click Here

Our grasp on reality is more slender and subjective than we imagine. It is very much determined by the biological functioning of our brains and the way it ciphers and recalls the information it receives.

Have you ever rewatched a movie and been surprised by what you thought it contained and by the parts you completely missed. This is not unusual. We not only don't see things as they are, we all so see them according to our previous life experiences and expectations. That is, we read into situations things that may not exist.

The rather tenuous grasp we have on "reality" can be very difficult to accept. We all like to feel confident that what we perceive and know is "factual". But in actual fact a lot of it isn't.

Because of the incomplete pictures we all have it is important to recognise that "our own truth" is not the same as another persons nor is our view of life matched exactly by any one elses.

This doesn't mean we stop trusting our experiences and perceptions of life but is does mean we should be more prepared to admit our own fallability and our need to hear what the world sounds like form some one else's perspective.

Otherwise for us the canaries will stop singing when in actual fact they havent!