A recent scientific study and article published in the Washington Post indicates that our perception of color is not entirely based on rational processes in our brain, but rather impacted by emotion.
We are impacted by our experiences - our beliefs, our habits, and everything that has happened to us. Now there's scientific proof that indicates it also "colors" our world.
Excerpt : "They’re a reminder that our experience of the world is not as immediate and objective as we’d like to believe. It’s easy to assume that cognition — what we think and feel — is a rational response to perception, that we intake information from our senses, process it, and then draw conclusions from that data.
But some psychologists believe that our understanding of the world happens “top-down” as much as “bottom-up.” In other words, higher-level cognition can determine what and how we perceive. Rather than seeing the world as it really is, our perceptions are colored — literally — by emotions and expectations."
Our reality is a culmination of our perception plus how we process that perception which comes in part from the subconscious mind and our life's experiences. This is an important concept taught in the Professional Hypnosis Certification Course taught at Cascade Hypnosis Training. Understanding how our clients think, and how that thinking drives behavior enables properly trained hypnosis professionals to address some of the most difficult challenges our clients face.
For example, imagine the following similar experience happens to two different people :
Laura has high self-esteem and doesn't worry about what other people think.
Nancy has a low self-esteem and is self-conscious and worries what others think of her.
Imagine the manager of an organization harshly criticizes both Laura and Nancy.
Laura's response : My manager is having a bad day. I'm going to stay out of his/her way and hope they start feeling better. I'm going to continue doing my job as I normally do. Maybe I'll go on walk over lunch to clear my head. I may start looking for another job that has a better adjusted manager.
Nancy's response : I'm not very good at my job. I'm worried I may lose it. I better start working harder. This is stressful. I don't like this. What's wrong with me? On the way home from work tonight, I'm going to stop and pick up some ice-cream, that always makes me feel better after a hard day.
This simple example demonstrates and to some extent exaggerates the experiences our clients go through on a day to day basis, and how past emotion and expectation come into play in our daily lives.
Using powerful hypnosis techniques such as Age Regression, Forgiveness Therapy, and Parts Mediation Therapy we can help our clients change their automated responses to life's challenges and feel more self-confident and happier. This ends the knee-jerk reaction to stressful and uncomfortable situations, and gives our clients the ability to respond in a thoughtful and meaningful way - leading to them having more fulfilling and successful lives. It also helps stop the common avoidance behavior, or feel-bad-distract cycle that is common for our clients.
Until science catches up with our perception of reality, as hypnotists it's important to understand that indeed our past experiences, emotion, expectation, and understanding of the world - our "map" of reality, will color all of our experiences. It will be interesting to watch the unfolding of this in our scientific community over time.