Perceiving the world through a different lens

I was riding my bike with a group of people who were from a different city. I began to notice things that were not there before. Or were they always there but I just haven’t noticed them?

Of course they were always there. So why haven’t I noticed the older building, certain billboards, the art, the shops?

Alva Noe pointed out that “What is out there in the world is content and we have access to that content by the use of various skills.” We have a limited capacity to consume all the information in the world. How we choose to consume that information is based on our ability to see, hear, taste, touch and smell.

We see a very narrow window of the world, and as I’ve pointed out before we tend to notice things that are more familiar to us. Imagine noticing something new everyday and not having any habits. We would be lost.

Habits are what help us move forward and grow. It may sound counter intuitive as habits are made so we do something well over and over again, yet without habits we cannot learn new things. Imagine having to learn how to brush your teeth every day and how to drink water or walk through a doorway.

In his book Out of Our Heads, Alva Noe does a great job at pointing out that we are not our brains, and that we do not understand consciousness. We understand the hard wiring of the brain and that the brain sends signals to our body to act and then signals are sent back to the brain to feel.

The spin is that our brain doesn’t actually feel and that our brain doesn’t actually direct our body to behave. It is the mind and the soul that does all of that.

Without getting fully immersed into his explanation to the way the human consciousness works he concludes that we are not our brain. There is something much more to us than a living habitual mass. Each and everyone of us is something that cannot be explained.

Why am I telling you this? I want you to understand that our perception and the way we do things guide us a long a path that could be predetermined or something that is spontaneous. That is something I cannot fully understand myself.

I can decide to eat a meal and then I know I will feel full after that meal. But I cannot predict if I will get food poisoning after eating that meal.

So that leaves me to say that we can focus on what we can control. That we can notice what is around us by simply observing and becoming aware through deliberate action. For example: telling yourself to notice something you haven’t noticed before.

Now when you look for something new, guess what, you will find it. How? Because you are challenging yourself.

Although I want to go deeper and say that other people’s reaction does change the way we perceive things.

When someone praises you on a job you have done you view that job differently than you would have if someone critiqued it.

When someone says “This is a beautiful place,” you take that information into your mind, not your brain, and you now start to observe and rationalize what is beautiful. What do they see that’s beautiful here that I didn’t before?

I am always told when I travel abroad that Vancouver is a green city. Living in the downtown core I see a lot of cars, pollution, back alleys and garbage.
When someone points out how green the city is I start to see more of the trees, the grass, the ocean, the flowers and the birds.

Why are we affected by what other people say? Maybe it is because we are all connected in some way, we are not as singular as we think we are. Or maybe it is the power of suggestion?

In the article by aps (association for psychological sciences) what we expect influences our behaviour. Psychological scientists Maryanne Garry and Robert Michael along with Irving Kirsch have concluded that:

“Across many studies, research has shown that deliberate suggestion can influence how people perform on learning and memory tasks, which products they prefer, and how they respond to supplements and medicines, which accounts for the well-known placebo effect.”

Does this mean we cannot think for ourselves? Well sure we can, we do all the time. You are in control of your behaviour, are you not? You are in control of what you see and don’t see. No one else is looking through your lens.

When we expect to see something, we don’t notice what is actually there. Our mind narrates a story for us that our habit has developed. Same goes for when we speak: when we expect to hear something we respond automatically as a force of habit rather than listening and responding to what is actually being said.

Have you ever caught yourself saying “you too” after someone tells you to have a good flight or to have a good ride? In reality it doesn’t make sense for you to say “you too” instead you should be saying have a good day. We are habitual creatures and this is what makes us capable of doing more even though we make these small errors.

“Your experience and your interests in life shape your perception” as was articulated by a psychologist.

I find this to be true. Our beliefs, education and experience have influenced us to see the world the way we see the world.

“Your perception and interpretation of the world is your fingerprint.”

In business, how the managers view things is very different from their employees. This is why it is important for the managers to receive continuous feedback from their employees, to be able to step into their shoes.

I would say the same goes for the employee, but the employee does not have the power to change the system without having permission from the manager. Thus having the manager better understand the employee’s perception.

Thank you for coming down this far. I hope you enjoyed this psychology based post, and remember we are not what we think we are. To be continued….

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Originally published at karasingroup.com on July 28, 2016.