Mr. Monk and the Phenomenological Attitude

In “Mr. Monk Gets a New Shrink,” as in most episodes, it is Monk’s incredible perceptive powers that solve the case. Monk notices not only what a very attentive detective might capture—such as the fact that the carpet was just vacuumed and the vacuum bag is empty—but he also notices that a small decorative rock has been moved. What strikes the audience and Dr. Kroger is how astounding it is that Monk would remember such a small detail. Dr. Kroger comments, “It’s amazing that you remember one particular rock,” to which Monk replies “Well, I’ve been staring at it for nine years; you know, gift ... curse ...”

But what is really amazing here? It certainly isn’t strange to look at something for nine years. We don’t move around constantly and we tend to keep the same things for long periods of time. Like many writers, I stare out the window into my yard when I am trying to come up with something good to say. I think of my grandparents who spent forty years in a house, looking out a kitchen window to a small yard and alley. Would they have noticed a small two-inch rock in the garden that was removed? Would I notice if the lawn timbers were moved a few inches one way or another? Why didn’t Dr. Kroger, for instance, who likely logged many more hours looking out into the courtyard, notice the misplaced rock?

Why does Monk see the misplaced rock? And why don’t we see it? The much-studied phenomenon of selective attention illustrates how we selectively ignore visual data that contradicts our normal experience. Selective attention underlines how we often fail to pay attention to the “corners” of our experience. For example, Levin and Simons discovered in a 1997 study that most people failed notice the change of an actor in a film. When an actor (not a famous one) was replaced by another actor (again not famous but also not similar in appearance to the original actor) who continued to play the same role, most people didn’t notice the change had been made. It seems as long as we get that the actor is the “boyfriend” or “evil genius” we will not pay attention to the switch.¹¹ When we read about studies like this, we’re sure that we would notice the switch, but many of us really don’t!

Imagine you’re standing in a public area and an interviewer approaches you and asks you innocently if you would answer a few questions. Agreeing, you start responding. After a few minutes, a couple of workmen walk between you and the interviewer carrying a large door. Following the briefest of pauses to allow the door to move past you, the interviewer politely finishes the survey and thanks you. What is difficult to believe is that most people will not notice that when that door was passed in between, the interviewer was switched with a different person.¹² We find such experiments disturbing—most of us think we really do see what is happening right in front of us! Test subjects are incredulous when they are told what happened but laughingly accept it when shown a video of themselves in the test situation.

In one of the funniest selective attention studies, subjects are asked to watch a short film with a number of people in white and black shirts passing a ball back and forth between each other. Typically, the “test” is to count the number of times the ball is passed. Intent on counting, most test subjects do not see a person in a gorilla suit, or a girl with a parasol, walk on screen.¹³ (You can see examples of these tests on YouTube by searching for “visual attention test.”) What will surprise you, having now read about these studies and being prepared, is that it seems impossible to not notice the gorilla-suit clad person, but most test subjects really don’t.

Why is there this curious “blindness” in our attention? It’s because what we “see” is more than what is visually in front of us. We don’t just “take in” what appears to our senses and then decide what it means. What we see is very much influenced by what we expect, both consciously and unconsciously. In selective attention studies, we find that we tend to not be aware of changes that do not seem possible. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that “The normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality.”¹⁴ We think that we are blank slates, and when we have a new experience, we are open to whatever appears to us. But actually, we come to even innocuous experiences with baggage. We exclude data that doesn’t make sense. It is just weird to imagine an actor changing mid-role, and so we ignore that data. It’s nonsensical for people in gorilla suits to be walking around. We tend to ignore the non sequitur because it’s not a real, living possibility for us.

If I enter into a room spoiling for a fight with my husband, I will certainly find one. If I venture into the world, assuming there is, or is not, a divine hand behind it, I will surely be confirmed in my assumption. If Captain Stottlemeyer enters the crime scene in “Mr. Monk and the Very, Very Old Man” assuming a 115-year-old man could not have been murdered, he will not be open to the possibility that a homicide occurred. The studies in selective attention tell us not just that our opinions and cultural heritage can influence how we interpret the world, but also that we have a psychological predisposition to ignore some elements of our perception and register others. But in order to be a great detective we must follow Sherlock Holmes’s prescription that “It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which are vital.”¹⁵

Unless I’m Wrong, which, You Know, I’m Not ...

In Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, a letter that contains scandalous information about a French royal personage has been stolen. The police are aware of who took the letter and even know where it is. However, despite exhaustive searches of the apartment with every means of technical and professional skill, they cannot find the letter. After hearing this tale from the prefect of police, C. Auguste Dupin, the celebrated investigator of the story, concludes that the letter isn’t hidden there, but must instead be there in plain sight and, under the guise of visiting the thief, finds the letter in open view. Dupin points out to his unnamed narrator that the police are unable to find the letter not because it is hidden from view, but because they can only see the world from their perspectives. They can only search under the supposition that something important would be hidden from view because they would hide such an important letter. They cannot distance themselves from their prejudices about what a criminal “should” do.

In crime scene after crime scene, Monk enters into a room crowded with other experts but, like Dupin, he perceives the clues that slip by everyone else. Monk’s talent is characteristic of any great detective: he sees what others pass over. Monk’s uncanny perceptual talents provide the tools to crack the case, but often the ability for these talents to shine requires a constant management of Monk’s extraordinary distractibility. Dirt, real or imagined, ordinary disorder, and any suggestion of asymmetry, all take Monk’s mind away from the task at hand. Indeed, Monk often seems more occupied with restoring clean order to his environment than with helping to solve a homicide. Only due to the constant chiding of Sharona, Natalie, and Stottlemeyer is Monk able to solve the crime.

Would Monk’s crime-solving abilities be stronger without his obsessive-compulsive tendencies? They are closely intertwined, or perhaps one and the same: Monk is distracted by things that we would likely ignore, but it is because he is distracted by so many seemingly inconsequential things that he notices incongruous elements that solve the cases. Monk really does perceive (not just see, but perceive) more than the rest of us.

The show Monk invites us to try and look both more closely and more broadly; to free ourselves from our own tendency to focus on what we think is present and relevant, rather than what is actually in front of us. Examples like the selective attention experiments show that we sometimes ignore big changes that are right in front of us. We “zone out” when traveling in a car, and when pressed with a question such as “Did we pass Main Street?” we’re unable to say. Or alternatively, when we’re in a tedious meeting, we might be unable to recall what has just been said even if we can hear the speaker quite clearly. In phenomenology, we call this the “natural attitude.”

Phenomenology is a tradition in philosophy guided by the investigations of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who wanted to start with everyday, natural experience instead of abstract, philosophical theories. This focus on experiences, such as these experiences of selective attention, helps explain why most people are both conscious and not conscious of what they see and hear, just like the prefect of police in The Purloined Letter, or someone not paying attention to a boring speaker, or the driver who does not remember where she has just been. Phenomenologists try and set aside how we think things are, and what we think we experience, by taking up a “phenomenological attitude.” In the phenomenological attitude, we approach the situation as unencumbered by preconceptions, perceptual or conceptual, and try to see things as they immediately and actually appear. When I zone out driving to work, I am thinking about something other than driving and thus my perception has faded into the background. In the phenomenological attitude, I want to be aware of all aspects of my experience not just those that seem the most important or catch my attention.

The phenomenological attitude does not replace the natural attitude. Zoning out in a boring meeting is surely a survival skill, not just a habit. Monk’s life demonstrates the consequence of being unable to leave the phenomenological attitude and return to the natural one. When Monk remains unable to distance himself from the commonplace disorganization we encounter, his inability to leave the phenomenological attitude is both impractical and pathological. His powers of perception come at a price: he is unable to “turn off” seeing dirt and disorder and he is incapable of shutting down the endless stream of his own neurotic thoughts. His colleagues find this seeing and caring about the mundane disorder of the immediate situation annoying and distracting. Because Monk sees everything, hears everything, he is both a surprising genius and a pathological obsessive.

What Really Happened

Monk would see the change in selective attention studies; he would notice the new interviewer or new actor and puzzle over the incongruity. Monk’s cognitive wiring is such that he is constantly being drawn to things that the rest of us pass over without notice. But how do those of us without his talents make sure to not fall into habitual ways of seeing—or not seeing, as the case may be? Phenomenology’s answer to the philosophical problem of how to separate out truth from predispositions, expectations, cultural assumptions, and perceptual errors is to start out by not worrying about the truth at all. Instead, start by providing a careful description of what you experience and “bracket,” or put to the side, any concerns with what should be true or what you expect to be true.

The father of phenomenology, Husserl, called upon us to return to what we experience more carefully, to what he calls going “back to the things themselves.”¹⁶ Phenomenologists make explicit what normally remains hidden from conscious awareness, because we are blinded to change or overly influenced by our cultural opinions. Phenomenologists strive to move from the “natural” attitude to the “phenomenological” one. In the natural attitude, we are like the other characters in Monk, in the phenomenological attitude we perceive the crime scene as Monk does. Our instinctive tendency is to stay in the natural attitude and not examine our opinions, beliefs, and habits that shape how we perceive others and the world around us.

In religious or political beliefs, we often find people who hold views opposite to ours to be stubborn and unreflective because they think they know the truth. We find those who cling so stubbornly to their “clearly false opinions” to be very frustrating. People tend to strongly defend their own views by excluding ones that disagree with them. We often accept only data that confirm our culturally-trained views, and exclude data that contradict them. As George Carlin once asked, regarding how each of us reflexively fails to understand the views of others as potentially valid, “Have you ever noticed that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and everyone who drives faster is a maniac?”

When we speak to someone who is very closed-minded, we have the impression of never being able to break that person’s foolish self-certainty. How can this ignorant person not see how wrong she is!? But we can also ask the other side of that question. Why is anyone “open-minded”? Why do philosophy at all? Philosophy asks us to be uncertain, to ask lots of questions that don’t have obvious answers. It ruins our previous ideas and is cruel enough to not always replace them with comforting alternatives. The path of an open-minded person is not necessarily a happy one. Why not just stay in the natural attitude with our prejudices and beliefs that make us content? If ignorant, prejudicial beliefs help support a sense of self-satisfaction and have deep cultural and psychological roots, why would anyone want to call them into question? Phenomenology argues that the experience of the “foreign” causes us to leave the natural attitude and move toward the philosophical. For example, I can’t help but question my own religious belief when I meet a reasonable intelligent person with a different one. This causes me to turn back on my own beliefs and see them as beliefs instead of as facts.

While religious and political views provide the ground for heated philosophical debates, the move to a phenomenological attitude can also be the simple experience of understanding that others do not see the world as I do. My first philosophical experience was when I was five. I had a pair of Charlie Brown snow overshoes. On the toes of the boots, the left had written “Good” and the right, “Grief.” I remember standing in the snow, realizing that if I wasn’t me, standing staring down at my toes, but was standing in front of me toe-to-toe, “Good Grief” would be upside down and I couldn’t read it. While of course my thoughts about the matter were pretty minimal, it did provide a brief glance that my world is a world for me. I have a perspective. My world is not necessarily everyone else’s world. I can only perceive my world; I cannot perceive the world.

At first this seems worrisome, since it is often the case—as with political views, for instance—that perspective seems to be the problem. It seems that if we could “get outside” our perspectives and really see the truth, we would find true knowledge. An absolute faith in the sciences, or scientism, holds a similar view. What is really true is something that will not permit a point-of-view; it would be something that would see something from all sides, all possibilities, at once. Phenomenology argues that this is based in the supposition that truth must be somehow without a perspective (or “objective”). It argues that a careful examination of our experience shows us that we have no reason to believe this.