I love the movies and it doesn't matter whether they are on TV or I get the luxury of taking time to go to the movie theater. Becoming engrossed in a good movie is my little personal vacation. And when I find a movie I truly enjoy I want to talk about it with anyone who has seen it. Yet as we know, discussing any topic where there are multiple points of view can be, well let's say interesting.
A few years ago a group of friends and family went to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. After the movie we began talking about a specific scene. One of my friends chimed in with her version and I immediately thought "I don't remember it happening that way" and I went off in my head about what I remembered. Her version of the scene was significantly different than mine. Ugg, didn't we all just see the same movie?
This is not unlike one of the many instances when as children my sister and I would fight and then run to our mother with our own versions of what happened. Wow, were they different! I used to think my sister was lying just to be mean and gain points with my mother. It wasn't until I took my first NLP training that I understood how these variations in stories happen.
The mind is an interesting device. One of its jobs is to record all kinds of information. It keeps a record of everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell (our five senses). In fact it is has been estimated that we encounter anywhere between two to 5 million bits of information per second (I've heard of estimates in the billions). That's a lot of information to store!
Clever and efficient machine that the mind is it begins the process of filtering the incoming information so we can manage it in a sane and useful way. These processes can happen in a nano-second and involve deleting, distorting and generalizing the incoming information. Within a fraction of a second your mind has filtered the incoming information down into about 134 bits of information, still too much to consciously manage (count out 134 toothpicks some time to get a feel for how much information this really is). Lastly, your mind takes the 134 bits and filters it into 7 bits of information plus or minus 2 to be used for your immediate purposes.
In addition, everyone has their own life experiences, memories and Metaprograms (this is an NLP term) that also filter information. All of these processes function to filter out or in what is most important to us at the time it is occurring.
Given the vast amount of information being thrown at us at any given moment and the wide array of filtering processes that take place, is it any wonder we see things differently? As a result of these amazing filtering processes we create our own perception of an event or experience. This perception then becomes our reality and in the case of the Harry Potter movie our way of seeing or remembering what happened with slight (or in some cases significant) variations as we recall the event.
So the next time someone says to you "you are in your own little world" you can respond with an emphatic "yes." We are all in our own world full of perceptions and filtered information. No two people can ever have the same "world" or description of an event or experience. It's a good point to keep in mind the next time you are debating just what happened during a conversation.
Have you ever sat through a meeting with a co-worker and discussed the meeting later only to find that you had different versions of what went on? 
