Mental Walls. (Part 1)

“Walls in the mind

They cripple and they bind

Keep you deaf Keep me blind

Keep us both confined.” -Elsa Schieder.

Walls in the mind are such powerful forces against seeing, hearing, registering what is going on. Our mind works the in best and worst situations and sometimes mind itself gets worst, creates mental walls around us that we may never be conscious of. These walls change the quality of our life for the worse.

Sometimes it happens that when you face any problem they stay with you for a very very long time, not that you want them to, but they do anyway. Now have you ever thought why such problems persist? It is because you have simply stopped thinking at other possible solution/alternatives. They continue to bug you because either you have never tried anything different or your efforts lack conviction. In either case its quite certain that your mind has walled you in and blocked you of new and useful information. And as a result, when you get/met some new fresh ideas you end up rejecting it, without even thinking or understanding them.

This happens because of these walls, they BLOCKS you and they BUGS you. In this first part of mental walls I will talk how these walls Blocks you.

BLOCKS, are basically the mental walls which do not allow you to correctly perceive a problem or plan its solution. Blocks creates obstacles in the way of you thinking and so you face difficulty in solving or perceiving the problems. Following are the types of mental blocks which we all experience:

1)The tendency to limit a problem too closely.

Ex: Draw four straight lines(without lifting the pencil from the paper) which will cross through all the nine dots.

A possible solution is shown at the end of this post.

A surprising number of people will not exceed the imaginary boundary even though it is not in the stated lines of the problem. The overly strict limits are examples of mental blocks. Expand the mind where limits don’t restrict.

2) Isolating a problem.

Just as common a block is the tendency to overly isolate a problem or to not adequately isolate it. One must learn to isolate the real problems from the apparent ones.

3) Stereotyping.

Stereotyping is automatically placing values on something – seeing what you expect to see. The following example of a visual “mind-blower” seems awfully strange because of our tendency to stereotype.

4)Saturation.

Saturation is when our mind subconsciously ignores the sensory inputs because they are familiar sights. For example, try to draw something that you used to it in your routines, like try to draw the fonts of some logo or brand, or try to draw your cell phone, or try to draw the sketch of the keyboard of your system, etc. Few people can correctly place the numbers and letters on the sketch they did. Our mind is so accustomed to our daily routine stuffs that we can’t remember what it looks like.

A very strange but possible solution to this block is to look at the world upside-down by bending over and looking between your legs. You will be surprised at how many details are now notice-able when you looked at from a different perspective.

5) Failure to utilize sensory inputs.

It is often said that people who are blind have other senses which are enhanced. They can better distinguish by touch, hear better and smell better. Might it not also be true that people who see rely heavily on vision and partially ignore their other senses.

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Solution of the nine-dots example: 

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2010

02/09

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