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uneventful flow of routine and familiar information with no security significance is not registered, while any departure from normal is immediately detected. For example, our attention is immediately drawn to the odour of new atmosphere on entering it, but after a passage of time there, we lose its awareness. People residing near railway lines or an airport can sleep soundly at night, because their sense of hearing does not pass on the signal of this daily familiar sound to the brain to ensure peaceful sleep. Their guests staying overnight, however, find their sleep disturbed by the noise of train/plane traffic. The beauty is that the hearing sense of the residents would ignore the loud din of a passing train or plane but if their names are called out, then that signal is immediately relayed to the brain, so that they could respond to it appropriately. Similarly, the mothers residing there continue to sleep soundly through landing of a plane, but would wake up on hearing a faint cry of their baby sleeping in the next room.
It is the function of sensory system, then, by their physiological design to reduce the amount of 'useless and irrelevant' information reaching us and to serve as selection systems. The information input through the senses seems to be gathered for the primary purpose of biological survival. 53
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented, and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual
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