Mia: "Don't talk to me about sport."

by MIA FREEDMAN

There are people in the world who do not know who Katie Holmes is. For them, it’s been a long and perplexing week as they’ve grappled to join in conversations with loved ones and co-workers. Tomkat? What?

ABC broadcaster Richard Glover confessed on radio to not having a clue who Katie Holmes was before she filed for divorce from Tom Cruise and shot to the top of the news charts with a bullet this week. “If you don’t know something, it can be a surprise to find out that everyone else does,” he noted. “And similarly, we all assume the things we know are common knowledge.”

This is too true. I have always believed in The Filter Principal. We all have to choose some broad categories of information to filter out of our heads. Because there’s so much of it coming at us and space is limited.

What do you filter out? It may be politics. Information about climate change. Sport. Names of films. For example. I choose to filter out sport and information about wine (although not actual wine which is better drunk than filtered). Also anything related to The Real Housewives (of anywhere). And yet I can recite the names and birthplaces of all six of Angelina and Brad Pitt’s children. Go figure.

What topics do you filter out? What topics can you NOT BELIEVE that other people filter out?