Nancilee Wydra

Child psychologists speculate that infants see as they learn what things are or don’t
see things until they learn what they are.   In a now famous experiment, Harvard’s
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon, asked subjects watching a basketball video,
to count the passes made by one of the teams.  Around fifty percent of the participants
didn’t remember seeing a person dressed in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the court
for a full nine seconds.  A gorilla is not what one expects to see on a basketball court
and expectation proved, at least in half the viewers, that reality alters based on
expectations.  
What else is going on to make a person screen out what’s in front of them?  Chabris and
Simon suggested:
``It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice anything happening in our
surroundings while being absorbed in the inspection of something; focusing our attention on a certain object may happen to such an extent that we cannot perceive other objects placed in the peripheral parts of our visual field, although the light rays they emit arrive completely at the visual sphere of the cerebral cortex.'' 
 
The above experiment illuminates two ideas, one that we see or experience selectively and
two, that focus alters reality.  In healing, we have a reality about our disease based on
what we are told, what we have seen within the framework of our culture and what we focus
on in getting well.  These may or may not be helpful to the reality that we want to achieve. 
Child psychologists speculate that infants see as they learn what things are or don’t
see things until they learn what they are.   In a now famous experiment, Harvard’s Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon, asked subjects watching a basketball video, to count the passes made by one of the teams.  Around fifty percent of the participants didn’t remember seeing a person dressed in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the court for a full nine seconds.  A gorilla is not what one expects to see on a basketball court and expectation proved, at least in half the viewers, that reality alters based on expectations.  
What else is going on to make a person screen out what’s in front of them?  Chabris and Simon suggested:
``It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice anything happening in our surroundings while being absorbed in the inspection of something; focusing our attention on a certain object may happen to such an extent that we cannot perceive other objects placed in the peripheral parts of our visual field, although the light rays they emit arrive completely at the visual sphere of the cerebral cortex.'' 
The above experiment illuminates two ideas, one that we see or experience selectively and two, that focus alters reality.  In healing, we have a reality about our disease based on what we are told, what we have seen within the framework of our culture and what we focus on in getting well.  These may or may not be helpful to the reality that we want to achieve.