Innovative people spend so much time questioning the assumptions of their industry, but they rarely question their own assumptions and belief systems with the same level of scrutiny. How you perceive the world has a huge influence on your personal and professional life. Those perceptions come together to form beliefs, and those beliefs have a huge impact on the actions we take. 

Percept-Genesis is the process we use to assign meaning to the world. Your brain has 2 complimentary strategies for this: Bottom-Up Processing & Top-Down Processing. 

Bottom-Up processing begins with an experience and the mind reacts to the information by trying to determine what it means. We perceive something happening and then search our memories for anything similar. We combine all the information together before deciding what the experience actually means. This is bottom-up processing. Something happens, we struggle for a moment to figure out what it means, then we conclude by slapping a label on it. We take the raw experience, condense it down into a neat category, and the write a label on it for storage.

The next time we experience something similar, we already have a label ready for it. This is top-down processing. In life, we’re guided by labels far more than  raw experience. What you think something ‘should’ mean is often more important than what it actually does mean. For example, there’s probably a food that you refuse to eat that other people enjoy. Your refusal is a label that you’ve placed on the food. People with different labels react differently. 

Top-down processing saves the brain a lot of energy. It’s why you’re able to treat similar things in similar ways. You don’t have to wake up every morning and using problem solving skills to recognize your significant other. This is top-down. You have a label ready, and you use it to determine your experience.

Babies are constantly using bottom-up processing because they don’t have any labels to rely on. They have to try something, observe what happened, and then create labels. As babies grow up, they have more top-down labels to work with. By adulthood, a person could live the rest of their life jumping around from one label to the next without challenging the labels. 

As creative people, we want to spend more time using bottom-up processing than non-creatives would. This gives us more time to question our assumptions and think original thoughts. Labels can easily kill your curiosity by taking a complicated situation and condensing it down into something overly simplistic. 

There’s no reason to get curious or explore the unknown if you already have all the answers in nice, tidy labels in your head. However, spending too long there will make you exhausted. There’s a reason the brain has two systems. Bottom-up uses a ton of energy. 

Our job as creative people is to do our best to work with accurate information. We can’t, and won’t, win every battle. Being highly creative is often about flipping back and forth between opposite strategies. This is no difference. We spend time using bottom-up processing until we feel that we have a “good enough” idea of what’s real or what’s possible. Then we assign a label to it so that we can make a decision and move on. However, we also keep in mind that that label is only a label. It represented our best guess at the time. It’s not set in stone. We might have been wrong. Or perhaps we were right, but things have changed since then. Using an outdated label will only lead to unnecessary limitations on your creativity. Oftentimes, this can kill your creativity. You say, “I know my first draft has to be great!” That idea is a label you place on your experience, and it will determine whether your first draft is a fun experience where you explored different ideas or if it makes you constantly feel stressed and not good enough. 

This weekend, I encourage you to keep this idea in mind. Not just for your creative life, but in your personal life as well. What labels have you been using that you forgot were just labels. What are some things that frustrate you or make you angry? What are some automated reactions that aren’t serving you? These are all areas where bottom-up processing can be used to change or eliminate labels that aren’t helpful. 

For me, I’ve noticed that a lot of the things I do to relax don’t actually make me feel relaxed. When I have downtime, I often go to YouTube. The top-down label tells me that I’ll have fun, but when I actually go there and begin watching videos, my bottom-up experience is anything but relaxing and fun. If I hit pause at random times while watching a video and ask myself if I’m truly having fun, I’d have to admit that I’m not. The label promised me relaxation, but it never actually delivered it. The opposite thing happens for my meditations. When I meditate, the bottom-up experience is incredibly rewarding and peaceful. However, the label I have for meditation isn’t a positive one. When I think about meditating, I reference the label, then decide I should do something else. 

Because labels determine what something means to you, they also determine what you do and what you don’t do. How you perceive the world is central to how you experience it. This weekend, pay close attention to the labels you’re using. You don’t need to change them right away. You don’t need to stress about them. This isn’t about creating a laundry list of things you need to do or change. This is about spending more time experiencing what is real instead of experiencing the label we slapped on it a long time ago. Take the label off and experience the world as it was meant to be experienced.