If you live next to a road that cuts large trucks every day or near an airport, you probably don’t hear their noise, yet it can disturb the ears of a new person in that place.
This is what happens when you enter, for example, a coffee shop: no matter how good the coffee is, the more time you spend, the more you smell until your nose doesn’t hear you.
These are things that our brain does to stop paying attention to the things that exist for a long time; the gradual change is known as familiarity.
Tali Sharot, a professor of brain function at Hari University, said that we need to save our body’s capacity.
It’s normal for the body to respond to something new that we see, relaxed/refreshed or felt for the first time, but after a while you see that you’re still alive and everything is fine, you don’t need to take care of it like before.”
Sharot, who co-authored a book called “The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,” adds that our brains find it appropriate to save capacity and prepare for something new that we may encounter.
Overlap
This brain function helps, on the one hand, give us strength to continue.
Sharot gives an example of work.
“Think of your first job; start it. You may have been happy and enthusiastic. But after 10 years, it would be strange if you were still interested in someone else.”
Custom or familiarity—bin also helps us overcome difficult situations such as losing a job or losing a loved one.
This neuroscientist said: “It is good that time helps us adapt because it allows us to continue working and living.
“It would be very difficult if you continued to get angry and hurt like it was when it started.”
Only, although this helps us to stay healthy, adapt and stop doing something about things that don’t change, it can affect us.
He says that there are times when we get used to something that bothers us and we get to the point where we treat it as irrelevant because it has become a habit, so we lack other options.
Even in Kinyarwanda, there are those who say that “evil is known as good.”.
But familiarity doesn’t just happen to the bad because it also happens to the good: because sometimes we take for granted the good that happens to us, yet this reduces the emotional power that other things like that raised inside us.
But Sharot advises that it is possible to cheat/lie your brain beyond this familiarity factor.
Learning there
That trick is to stop for a while and watch that thing from around the world.
Sharot explains that what you are aiming for is “to see if it is good or bad”.
In doing this, “you have two related methods. One is to take the youth for that thing, where it is; when you leave that place, there is something you are used to; even if it is a short time, it can be like the end of the week.
AMANI Nesta