The Assumption Principle

Have you ever wonder how they can put a two-hour movie on a DVD?

The trick is to take a full-length movie and compress it until the data will fit on the DVD

And this is how it is done

A video is a sequence of 24 static frames/pictures per second.

Let’s assume we are watching a scene where two people are talking in a room for a minute.

That will be 24 frames per second times 60 seconds for a minute equals 1440 frames or pictures.

That is a lot of pictures to store for just one minute of the movie, so we have to somehow compress all that in a smaller data.

If we take all the frames/pictures and line them up on a table by looking at the sequence we’ll see that there is a lot of resemblance between the frames. The room always stays the same, the walls and the furniture doesn’t change from picture to picture, it is only the two people that are talking that are changing from one picture to the next. So what we can do is to take the first picture, called the “reference frame”  and record it entirely with all the details and for the following pictures record only the changes. And that in principle is the way we compress a video file.

To play back the video we take the reference frame and subsequently reconstruct the following frames by adding only the changes that happen between the frames. Once again this is the theory, in practice, there is a lot of math involved and things are a bit more complicated than that.

So besides being an interesting technical tidbit why are we talking about video compression?

We do it because a similar process happens in our brains; I call it the Assumption principle.

We think we are perceiving reality entirely but in fact, we are starting with an “assumption” and reconstruct the reality by adding to it as our experience unfolds.

This principle is the basis of all magic tricks.

All magic tricks happen in our mind they do not happen on the stage.

All magic tricks start with the magician building in our mind a false assumption; If he wants to cut his assistant in half he first has to convince us that the assistant is laying in the box – she is not, that is a false assumption, or if he wants a tiger to appear in a cage first he has to convince that the cage is empty – that is the false assumption that makes the trick look like magic.

Without creating the false assumptions in our mind magic tricks wouldn’t work.

The assumption principle works in real life the same way it works on the stage.

For example; the more bicycles are in a city the fewer bicycle accidents there are.

It sounds counterintuitive but is true. 

We have an assumption in our head that there are or that there are no bicycles on the street based on past experiences hence on that assumption we will see or not see the bicyclists on the street.

I know you are convinced that this doesn’t apply to you but it does, you are just not aware of it.

Our assumptions determine the outcome of our actions.

If you believe that there are opportunities out there waiting for you, you will see and find them.

There are millions of dollars available, thousands of untapped opportunities, the job of your dreams, the perfect woman or man you are waiting for.

Everything you desire or dream about exists already; it is just not yours yet.

The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is the set of assumptions and false assumptions we have.

Your assumptions are the reference frames in your life movie. You build your experiences starting with your assumptions.

If you don’t like the movie of your life you have to change your assumptions, better said, you have to get rid of your false assumptions.