In his book, the Mindful Brain, Daniel Siegel talks about the top-down approach we use in processing incoming experiential information. “I will use top-down to imply how ingrained brain states can impinge on emerging neural circuit activations and thus shape our awareness of ongoing experience in the present moment.” I’d like to break this down in order to show how our lives can come to feel like the daily grind and how cultivating present moment awareness with mindfulness practice can break up what might be considered a misperception.

“Ingrained brain states.” Our capacity to turn experience into learning has been, and still is, one of the essences of our survival as a species. As we convert experience to a knowing of the world we naturally come to check experience against our database of knowledge.

“Can impinge upon emerging neural circuit activations.” Simply put, we come to over rely upon this interpretation of experience through past learning. We come to see the world through filters of past experience. And this seems to be a matter of variety in that we apply this strategy across the broad spectrum of our experience. It is one thing to take in factual data about something like a job search and quite another to interpret the feeling state of your spouse and rather unconsciously relate it to past experiences of intimate relationship and draw the same conclusions. This is an example of NOT seeing what is in the moment. This is how the top-down process comes to, “shape our awareness of ongoing experience in the present moment.”

It is because this process is automatic and mostly unconscious that we need to practice actually being present with things as they are in the moment, the essence of mindfulness. We practice so that we come to automatically interrupt the top-down process and make a conscious choice as to whether or not the stored data is relevant to the present moment circumstance.

And with regard to the daily grind feeling; if we come to view our experience predominantly through filters of past experience we are bound to see the present as a repeat of our past. Further, we actually come to expect things to turn out a certain way. We actually miss opportunities right in front of us because we are wearing these increasingly opaque lenses. Let’s call them past glasses. It’s catchy, no?