We make our own reality
Posted on 31. Jan, 2010 by Rick in TED, video | 0 comments
My “day job” is in geriatric mental health. We work with helping to improve the quality of life for seniors and their families, especially those living with dementia. In the mental health space their is a mode of treatment called reality orientation. Generally, in dementia care reality orientation if frowned upon because it only serves to re-enforce in the client that their is something “wrong” with their brain, at least as other people see it. Reality orientation also presents challenges because it assumes that there is one correct or agreed upon reality.
But, is that the case?
In this video from the February 2006 TED conference in Monterey California, Dr. Michael Shermer (Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and Executive Director of the Skeptics Society) talks about how what we perceive is affected by our expectations and our perspective. There is a great example at about 10 minutes into this video of how what we think we hear is distorted by what we expect to hear.
We make our own reality.
So, in the case of dementia, whose reality is right?
In my work with Alzheimer’s patients, I have seen time-and-again, that what most people dismissed as a break from reality was really just an unexpected response to environmental surroundings. I have seen clients who seemed to be hallucinating–who were labelled as hallucinatory–only to find out that the client was finding patterns in their surroundings that most of us would ignore.
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