How Your Brain Filters Reality

You learn a new word and suddenly it's everywhere. Same word, same world,

but your brain just changed. This is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and it reveals something

shocking about your brain. When you learn something new, you aren't actually

seeing it more. Your Reticular Activating System suddenly starts filtering for it.

Your brain has 11 million bits of information hitting it every single second,

but you can only process 40. So your brain decides what matters. Once that word matters

to you, it's all you see. It's like when you decide to buy a red car.

Suddenly red cars everywhere. They were always there, but your brain wasn't