Seeing is believing

One of the principles of NLP is that we would be so overwhelmed by the huge amounts of sensory data entering our nervous systems that we have to filter out a lot of what comes in to conciousness. We reduce this information burden by deleting, generalising and distorting our experience.

I came across an amusing demonstration of deletion and distortion in this video talk: Michael Shermer on TED Talks (although he doesn’t call it deletion and distortion). Michael Shermer is the president of the US Skeptics Society, in this talk he’s demonstrating the ease with which we can be lead astray by our senses and expectations.