The RAS (which is a catchy acronym for Reticular Activating System) is quite like a bouncer at some Hollywood high end club, its brief is to filter out the commoners, and only allow the new, the interesting and the relevant. The RAS, just like the bouncer at the-hottest-place-to-be-at-this-moment, is highly judgemental, highly influenced and pretty biased. For all its self-importance, it is a tiny bundle of little neurons, about the size of your little finger, and a couple centimetres or so high in the back of your skull. The Reticular Activating System receives stimuli from your senses (with the exception of smell, which is wired in directly to the brain that’s why some smells will trigger memories unbidden) and decides what to do with it.
It is estimated that we, or our little Rassle Dazzle bouncer RAS at least, will receive somewhere about two million bits of stimuli through our senses per second. Our eyes take in more than 300 megapixels of visual information each second, our skin has about a million nerve endings all reporting temperature, pain, pressure, location etc. Our brain has nowhere near that processing capacity, it is estimated to have only between 80-150 bits per second capacity. A good portion of the million and most bits are thought to be redirected into our unconscious brain (the lounge bar where the less hot celebs are hanging out, but who are still making the news) and the rest are simply turned away.
Turning away information is on some levels, totally fine. This is the information your RAS has judged as safe to ignore. For example, if you have grey carpet, your eyes will report this every time they look at it. Your RAS will turn it away because we already know that from 16bazillion reports ago.
The information bits redirected to the unconscious brain, aka the lounge bar, is the dull hum of information about our world, for example your skin reporting that the temperature is comfortable, and you don’t need a coat right now or keeping our body tuned to the path we are walking on instead of veering off. We send that information into the waiting lounge bar because it IS important to know we are on the footpath and we aren’t freezing, it isn’t however, particularly newsworthy unless it changes. It’s not safe to completely disregard it, but we aren’t sending it up to the conscious brain.
What gets prioritised and sent up a level for consideration then? The RAS is located close to the reptilian brain, and this part of the brain will always prioritise the things that keep us alive and safe, this means food, community and threat. Humans have a built-in negativity bias and goes hand in hand here. This is where our bias locates and highlights threats to us, which includes the obvious life and death, but also the threat to our sense of belonging, and to our sense of emotional safety, we prioritise this information and, with the help of the bias, we assume the worst.
After risk assessing the information, and assuming the worst, what isn’t yet prioritised the clever little bouncer RAS will apply a personalised set of rules according to your deepest held beliefs, and most current goals and stories.
Have you ever lusted after a particular thing, let’s say a red car, and suddenly they are everywhere you look? That’s your RAS at work. It knows you’re interested in red cars right now, so all things red car gets filtered in. (Imagine if you had a story about your fraudulent-ness…!)
Three reasons why this should all matter to you in your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your RAS will filter in stimuli that supports the story you are telling yourself. Make sure it’s a story you want to support. Affirmations and other self-care supports are helpful here as a scaffolding for change while you deselect the story you’ve telling yourself and select on you would prefer, and then simply leave your RAS to locate the evidence.
- Relationships and belonging are one of the RAS’s primary threat filters, it will prioritise invitations into communities so you can increase your feelings of belonging. Some communities you DO want to belong to, some you don’t. The RAS is only going to filter in information that lets you know that you are being invited here, it’s up to you to decide if you want to be there (hint shiny objects and habitual yes/ overcommitting can be found here)
- Any threat to your business (particularly if it is your livelihood and not a side hustle) is going to register as a sense of threat to your survival. This will get filtered in. It’s up to you to decide if that threat is worthy of any more attention rather than taking all of them as a genuine threat.
- The entrepreneurial journey is fraught with A LOT of information and growth curves, this means that the RAS is going to work harder and perhaps have more trouble filtering as it encounters new stimuli and has to figure out its relevance. More will get filtered in. This will tire you and overwhelm you. Make preparations to allow for this fatigue.
If any of this registers, don’t hesitate to reach out for a chat.
Gentle with you
A
Amy Madden 