Taking It All In

(light clicking) (soft relaxing music) Headspace Studio. Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace. It's a Wednesday morning. I don't know whether you have children or not, whether you perhaps have nieces or nephews or grandchildren, whatever, but a few days back I was sat down chatting with my wife. We were having dinner and the kids were not in a separate room, but kind of a different part of the room, and they were watching TV. As we were chatting, it looked like a first glance as though they were completely engrossed in the program. I mean, if you'd have looked at them, I mean, they're almost catatonic looking at the screen completely sort of locked in. And yet we were having a conversation and all of a sudden the older one of the two turned around and commented on what we were talking about. So we had assumed that we were having a conversation that they weren't really listening to. Thankfully it was nothing bad. But we assumed that we were having a private conversation even though they were in the room. But clearly, despite being very engrossed in the TV show, there was an element of his mind. There was the capacity to hear what we were saying. (soft music) And I think it's really interesting when we think about in life, just how much we are actually taking in all of the time. Some of it we're consciously taking in, some of it we're intentionally taking in, but actually the brain is constantly at work. And it reminded me, I remember leaving a long retreat, the transition from that retreat coming back into everyday life. So I've been away for about a year. I've been in the countryside and I left the monastery. I was driven to a local train station, and I was heading back to another city. There's a sat on that train. The sheer volume of sensory input was almost overwhelming. So I'd been in a very quiet place really no stimulation around at all, deliberately so, and yet all of a sudden the sound, as I sat in that seat, it wasn't that I was intentionally listening, but the sound of newspapers rustling, of crisp packet's opening, of the trains kind of passing by, of people's different conversations. It was almost as if I could hear every single thing that was happening on the entire carriage. And at that point it felt overwhelming. (soft music) And I think if we lived our life in that way, we would probably feel overwhelmed. So eventually the mind has to get to a point where it's comfortable in that environment, where we're essentially sort of not conscious of all those things. But just because we are not conscious of them doesn't mean that we're not taking them in. Doesn't mean that the brain's not having to work hard. I remember telling a friend about this when I came back from that journey, and...