This week’s Better You, Backed by Science is about editing. But not the writing kind. It’s the kind of editing your brain does that affects what you notice. It’s known as habituation.
Have you ever driven home and realised you remember almost nothing about the journey?
Or reached the end of a familiar walk and suddenly wondered where your attention had been?
It isn’t because your brain was switched off.
It’s because it was being wonderfully efficient.
One of the brain’s jobs is to help us navigate the world without becoming overwhelmed by information. If it treated every tree, every lamp post and every familiar street as though it were brand new, we’d quickly become mentally exhausted.
So instead, it does something quite clever.
It edits.
Once something becomes familiar, the brain stops paying it quite so much attention. It assumes, “I’ve seen this before. I already know what it is.”
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. Our ancestors benefited far more from noticing the movement in the bushes that might have been a predator than from carefully admiring the same tree they’d walked past every day.
But here’s the interesting – and, I suppose, challenging – part.
The brain doesn’t only edit out the ordinary.
Sometimes it edits out the beautiful.
Like the flowers you’ve walked past hundreds of times.
The way the morning light falls through your kitchen window.
The sound of birds you no longer notice.
Even the faces of people you love can become so familiar that you stop really seeing them.
It doesn’t edit them out because they’ve become less beautiful. Definitely not. It’s because they’ve become familiar.
Psychologists call this habituation.
As we become accustomed to something, our response to it gradually diminishes. It’s one of the reasons a strong perfume fades from your awareness after a few minutes, even though the scent is still there.
The same habituation principle quietly shapes our experience of everyday life: the extraordinary often disappears into the ordinary.
And it isn’t because it has changed.
But because our attention has.
Try This: Overturning habituation
So here’s something to try this week to counteract habituation and welcome back the extraordinary in everyday moments.
Take your usual route to work.
Or your regular walk.
Or even just walk through your home.
But this time… pretend you’ve never been there before.
Notice five things you’ve never consciously noticed.
You may be surprised by what was quietly waiting to be seen.
Because perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves isn’t a more interesting life.
Perhaps it’s noticing more of what’s already there.
After all…
The ordinary isn’t less beautiful than it used to be.
It’s simply become more familiar.
References
1) A review on habituation: Rankin CH, Abrams T, Barry RJ, et al. (2009). Habituation Revisited: An Updated and Revised Description of the Behavioral Characteristics of Habituation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92(2), 135–138. Link.
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