The Tetris Effect & The Power of Focus: What We Look For is What We See

I've been reading Sean Achor's, The Happiness Advantage and have been loving every bit of what I've been learning...

I wanted to share with you this interesting psychological phenomenon that Achor refers to in his book as "The Tetris Effect." It got it's name after a group of research participants played the addictive game "Tetris" for several hours for 3 days in a row. The results were somewhat startling, as the participants began seeing every aspect of their lives as one big Tetris game. Whether they were looking at the empty space in between sky scrapers, a brick wall, or the items in their grocery cart--every aspect of everyday living was a Tetris game to them. And the reason for this is because they had conditioned their minds to act a certain way while playing Tetris, and were inadvertently carrying out that same thought pattern in their normal lives as well.   

The participants had programmed their minds to fill in empty spaces, and were therefore seeing an opportunity to do so in every aspect of their lives. However, this principle of neural-programming applies to anything we choose to invest our time and focus on. 

You see, our brain acts as a neural “spam filter” constantly scanning the world to decide what information it should keep and process, and what information it should disregard or “delete” based on how we've “programmed” our brains. For example, if an individual has “programmed,” or trained, their brain to filter out the positive—just as our spam filter would automatically eliminate any junk e-mail, then the brain will act in the same way—automatically filtering out perceivable positive experiences because it has been trained or programmed to scan and search for only the negative.

 Sound a little weird? Well, try this:

In 10 seconds try to find as many brown-colored objects as possible. Ready? Go!

Finished?

Okay now, without looking around the room again, tell me all the blue things that you saw.

Chances are you’re not able to recollect seeing any blue objects, or at least not nearly as many brown objects that you saw.

And why is that? Because you saw what you looked for and the rest you dismissed.  

Achor writes, “Instead of creating a cognitive pattern that looks for negatives and blocks success, [we must] train our brains to scan the world for the opportunities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow.”

I hope you found that post interesting or inspiring, and as always I wish you all a wonderful week! 

If you’d like to see for yourself a demonstration on the power of 

selective attention then be sure to check out this video J

For more examples of the Power of Focus, and what you can do to shift your attention in the right direction, be sure to check out my post, "It's All About Focus!"