Sifting and sorting are referred to throughout The 7 Skills to impress™ book. It is first described in Part 1, Chapter 2.
Our senses stream millions of bits of data every second. It’s a torrent so large, fast, and chaotic that, if left unfiltered, our brains would be at risk of overwhelm.
And so, from early childhood, the subconscious starts to pick out and store patterns that keep cropping up. It uses these patterns as a shortcut to filter meaning from the deluge. After a while, the subconscious mind learns to manage the flood of data by:
- Sifting and sorting for familiar patterns.
- Slotting the patterns into your impression of reality.
This process tends to reinforce a person’s world view or Identity, which was mostly set by the age 6.