Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 7

Behavior/feeling/thinking (external behavior/internal state /internal computation)

This is a very old and simple way to divide our experience into three general scopes that will be available in every experience, but are frequently ignored. As long as we are awake, we always have some behavior (at least breathing and heartbeat), some internal feeling state, and some kind of thinking. Often however, we pay much more attention to one of these general areas of an experience, deleting most or all of the other two.

For instance, people who are often described as �emotional,� or �dramatic� or �expressive� pay a lot of attention to their feelings and actions, but they are often relatively unaware of their thinking that elicits these responses. Many scientists and mathematicians attend primarily to their thinking and may be mostly unaware of their feelings or their �geeky� behavior. Skilled athletes have to be exquisitely aware of their physical behavior, but may be much less aware of their thinking and feeling. Redirecting attention to a larger scope that includes whatever we are attending to less (or not at all) is an example of attending to a different or overlapping scope, with different information.

Connirae Andreas� �naturally slender eating� strategy (4, ch. 12) is based on imagining how full your stomach will be with the next bite of food�in contrast to how full you are after you have overindulged. This is a shift from past to future scope, and it is also a shift in the scope of the sensations that are attended to, from the taste of the food, which is what gets many people to eat too much, to the sensation of fullness, which is a dependable signal to stop eating.