Composing Experience

The Perceptual Process model describes the information flows we use in the composing experience. I want to shift focus now to look at some of the ways we manage that information. Two major processes through which we do that are awareness and attention. As a simplistic first approximation, we might say that awareness makes […]

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So far we’ve been looking primarily at the perception of information impinging on you from the outside world. But human experience involves more than that. You are a physical being, with a physical body that moves through space and interacts with the world around you, physically and in other ways. You assess situations, make […]

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Past experience and what you learn from it play a significant role in shaping your perceptions and your current experience. The examples we’ve looked at so far make that clear. That’s why you could recognize things like faces and vases, characters like B and 13, and four suites of playing cards — two red […]

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I’ve described composing experience as a process of selecting and assembling bits of information from an ongoing perceptual stream into the multidimensional images we use to experience the world around us. The familiar faces/vase figure provided one example of how using information from different parts of the perceptual stream can produce different experiences, while the […]

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When I teach Composing Experience in workshops, I often begin with a direct experience illustrating how strongly your unconscious choices can affect your experience — even in situations that seem clear and straightforward. This is one of those experiences.
The situation is one in which you put one hand on your forehead and hold it there, […]

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