Indulge me for a moment — take a good look at this image. What do you see? Write it down. We will come back to your answer later.
I first came across this image in Amy Herman’s book “Visual Intelligence” a few years back and found the story she told of her first encounter with it intriguing as it tied into an experience from my childhood that still informs my thinking to this day. Amy Herman is an art historian and a lawyer and teaches a range of institutions including the NYPD, the FBI and the Department of Defence the art of observation. She uses art - picture and sculptures primarily - to teach her law-enforcement clients how to observe and assimilate minute details and using their enhanced observational skills better to assess critical situations into which they are routinely thrust. She teaches, if you will, the difference between looking and seeing.
Back to the image. If you saw a skull, or a platypus, or anything except a cow or even nothing then, congratulations: you find yourself in the majority. Most people see something other than what “Renshaw’s Cow” actually depicts, namely a cow standing before a wrought iron gate or fence.
See it now?
What about now? If you saw anything other than the cow, go back to the original photo and try to see what you originally thought you saw. The platypus or skull or whatever it was the image represented to you is now impossible to -re-see once you know what the image really represents. Of this image and the conclusions she draws from thousands of observations of how people respond to it, Amy Herman writes
“It seems obvious that we all see things differently. Yet we constantly forget, and act as if there is only one true way to see. However, knowing now that we are all susceptible to inattentional blindness and other pereceptual errors, we cannot assume that anyone else sees what we see, that we see what they see, or that either of us accurately sees what’s really there.
No two people will see anything the exact same way. Everything from our inherited biology to our learned biases influences the way we take in the world. Not only do we as individuals observe, notice, and gather information differently, we also perceive what we have gathered differently.”
Amy refers to these biases as “perceptual filters” and they are crucial in allowing us to process the endless stream of sensory data in which we are constantly immersed.
“While the world is filled with limitless information and stimulation, our brain cannot , and should not, process everything we see. If we did , we would be overwhelmed with data. Imagine standing in Times Square. If our eyes are wide open, they are encountering thousands of physical things at once — dozens of flashing billboards, garishly lit buildings, flagpoles, taxis, shops, street performers, and some of the 330,000 people who pass the same spot daily — but we do not “see” it all. Our brain automatically filters our surrounding and allows only a small percentage of information to pass through to protect us from an information overload that might otherwise paralyze us.
~ Amy Herman “Visual Intelligence” (2016)
How those filters work, which ones we use, and how we then process the data that does manage to get through is exactly what the study of mental models and heuristics seeks to examine. We jump to conclusions, and leave out huge pieces of information that don’t fit our initial theory or narrative that purports to make sense of the data. We construct a simplified model of reality and then work within the confines of that model, often ignoring or underweighting and discounting any new information which might upset that model. The economist J.K. Galbraith once famously quipped that ”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Given that we are making decisions — some more, some less important — on the basis of our perceptions of reality on a daily basis, we do best when we understand the processes by which we reach those decisions, the influences that shape our perceptions and by taking control of our thinking, as fas as we are able.
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