A Podcaster's Take on the Reticular Activating System

A few days ago Mindset Mentor podcaster Rob Dial discussed something that drew my attention.  Although by no means a trained scientist, he has made no secret of his interest in neurology, especially with regard to how cognition affects our behavior.  In that episode, he brought up the concept of Reticular Activating System, or RAS.  According to Dial, RAS is the means our brains use to filter out the enormous amount of information our senses pick up (he cited 11 million bits/second), down to what we can consciously take it (only about 55-120-bits/second).  I don't know the science behind his claim, but I see his point and agree with it.  People can make their own deliberate decisions as to what they see as significant and also choose to diminish awareness of things they perceive as irrelevant or trivial.  The problem is when people allow others to filter out things for them...there is a word for this: brainwashing.  In case you're not getting what I'm driving at, Dial gave a simple example.  Let's say you're driving down the road a few miles.  Someone later asks you about the red cars you saw and it's likely you didn't even notice them.  But if on the same trip you had decided that red cars carried some significance, you would have been taking notice all around you.  Political propagandists, be it on social or mass media, do something similar, especially when pointing out flaws or mannerisms of their imagined opponents.  What all this results in are separate threads of shared cognition among population groups, depending on their members' chosen sources of information.  Which in a sense is a voluntary form of brainwashing.  What Rob Dial suggests is that each of us can sit down with pen and paper and work out the things that we want to emphasize and take in on our respective daily walks of life...that is, self-brainwashing, but not as a dog on someone else's leash!  So for me I'm finished with all the political BS and bias...you can believe whatever you want and worship whichever personality cult idol you want.  I am not triggered by the kinds of things others use to arouse mass fear and outrage...be a sheep and follow that crap if you want!  Life is too short and precious for me not to stop and assess the things that I as an individual deem to be important.  This doesn't mean that I don't deeply value those close to me, and I still see myself as being in the larger community of society around me.  But enough is enough: if Dial is right, brainwashing is going to happen whether someone does it to me or I do it to myself: I'm choosing the latter...