Karmic Perception

In this section, I'm going to talk about how thoughts, feelings and actions affect perceptions using a slightly different method of analysis to the previous section.

Thoughts and Feelings affect perception through a number of psychological mechanisms:

  • mood affects perception
  • Expectation effects perception
  • Thoughts trigger our CNS
  • Compassion meditation affects our vagus nerve
Actions affect perceptions
  • the false consensus effect shows that people who act in certain ways not only think that other people act that way, but perceive other people to act that way
  • Nervous system plasticity and musical instruments
  • training habits and mindfulness?
Implicit attentional bias:

These are things we pay attention to below the threshold of conscious awareness. For instance, alcoholics pay more attention to alcohol-related stimuli. People with GAD pay more attention to danger related stimuli. Their eyes stay longer on pictures of these objects. This means that alcoholics literally perceive more alcohol. People with GAD literally perceive more dangerous stimuli in their environment. I assume that musicians would have similar results for music-related stimuli. Baseball players would have similar results for baseball-related stimuli. Kind people would have similar related results for kindness related stimuli. Angry people would have similar results for anger related stimuli. But this needs to be tested.

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