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Believing IS Seeing: A Quick Brain Hack That Will Change Your Life

Lukas Schwekendiek
3 min readSep 25, 2022

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Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

I want to try something with you right now:

Take a look around your room and look at everything that is red.

Try to remember as many things as you can, really focus on the reds.

Take a minute to do this now.

Then I want you to close your eyes and count how many things you saw that were blue.

Pretty difficult, right?

Now look back around the room and count the blues once more.

I assume you counted more the second time around, but here comes the interesting part:

You probably also counted some purples/turquoises as blues! You cheater!

Our minds are great at looking specifically for what we pay attention to.

This proved to save our lives countless times in the past, and is now responsible for a lot of different beliefs.

For example, if you believe the false stereotype that women are horrible drivers you will remember more women that were bad drivers than you will remember men that are bad drivers, even though there is an equal number of both!

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Lukas Schwekendiek
Lukas Schwekendiek

Written by Lukas Schwekendiek

Life Coach, Speaker, Writer. Published on TIME, Inc & Huffington Post. Coaching available again! Email: Lukas.schwekendiek@gmail.com with the word "Coaching"

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