Significance and Salience

At the next stage, after the data has been processed, our brain places a chemical tag on the data at a different level of "meaningfulness'.
  • Is it interesting?
  • Does it make sense?
  • Is it something we want to recall for the future?
  • Is it significant?
  • Do we value it?

But we also have to tag if it is credible.  
Do we think it is true or accurate? Does it refute other beliefs and ideas we have? Does it come from an authority that we trust?

These responses are mostly unconscious and automatic. Even the tagging of the most complex concepts initially occurs on an unconscious level.

We even have an emotional reaction to trivia. Such as celebrity romances or split-ups. 

We respond to things that we hear so that our brain can prioritize, but often we can have quirks that make that difficult and we can’t organize our thoughts in a way that is helpful, and those quirks can be lifelong learning differences or they can occur once in a while due to overload or stressors.
 
There is constant random processing of stimuli because our brain is absorbing and filtering billions of bits of data. 

What happens to all this data?
The initial list is all the things that could happen internally to those perceptions being processed in our brain and our storage. We have this vast storage of associations. Everything from the autonomic systems responses such as breathing, blinking, to motor reflexes to “procedural memory” of how to do everything we have learned to do such as tying our shoes, walking, and driving . . . to highly abstract intellectual concepts.
 

Categorizing

During this process, we create maps, models and categories to incorporate both new data and stored concepts into our general schema. For example, we tend to automatically label other people based on unconscious constructs used to quickly identify unfamiliar objects in our environment. This tendency to categorize can easily lead to bias and stereotyping,