3

The Platypus and the Gentleman Thief

Why No Two People See Things the Same Way

 

FOR ALMOST A DECADE the Rubin Museum of Art in New York has hosted a unique series of events called Brainwave. The program pairs performing artists, writers, and musicians with neuroscientists to explain to a lay audience what is happening in the brain when they experience something. I was fortunate enough to attend a session with Dr. Marisa Carrasco, a cognitive scientist from New York University, and deception specialist Apollo Robbins, a short man with an earring in his left ear and a small soul patch.

During the presentation the following photograph was shown on the screen. “What do you see?” Robbins asked the audience.

 

 

I didn’t really see anything, so at first I thought the image was not a photograph. I figured it was some sort of Rorschach inkblot test to reveal a secret about our psyche.

Aside from being a professional speaker, Robbins is a charming theatrical larcenist who calls himself “the Gentleman Thief.” He could take the bracelet off my wrist and the glasses off my head without my ever knowing. Before the show, while posing as an usher, he had done exactly that to many guests, shaking people’s hands and robbing them blind. (He returns everything.) After picking the pockets of former president Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail, Robbins became a security advisor and now trains law enforcement on sensory awareness.

Now Robbins assured us that we were indeed viewing a genuine unaltered photograph. He even threw in a hint: “It’s a four-legged mammal.”

Still, I saw nothing.

The person sitting next to me recognized a definitive animal almost immediately. She settled back in her seat, satisfied. I continued to look. Harder. I looked upside down. I squinted.

The woman next to me whispered, “I can’t believe you don’t see this.”

I do this for a living! How could I not see it? Finally, I had to guess. It was a platypus, I decided. Before you look at the next photo, take another look at the previous one. What do you see?

 

It’s a photo of a cow. Do you see it now?

 

Renshaw’s Cow with face outlined.

 

Without the outline, I would never have seen the cow. A cat maybe. A platypus, sure. But not a cow.

While Robbins’s lesson was on “illusion confusion” and how our brains can play tricks on us, I use the same photograph in my class for a different purpose: to prove that no two people see things, even facts, the same way.

I’ve shown the cow photograph to thousands of people through the years and have gotten just as many different answers as to what it is—from a dragon to the Hindenburg to a woman shopping for bras. While most people can see, not everyone sees the same things. This premise gets more complicated when we’re looking at things that aren’t as black-and-white as a black-and-white photograph and could be subject to so many interpretations.

 

Eve Oosterman.

 

For instance, Toronto mother Ruth Oosterman posted this picture of her two-year-old daughter and her latest creation and posed the same simple question to her online readers: what do you see? The responses that poured in from around the world were as varied as the people sending them: rabbit ears, wildflowers on a seashore, a willow tree, a bucking Shetland pony, a robot dance party.

“Almost every single person saw something different in the shapes and lines,” Ruth recalls.

Ruth’s own ability to interpret her toddler’s drawings led to a mother-daughter collaboration years before she thought such a joint effort would be possible. Ruth, a professional artist, would strap baby Eve into a carrier on her chest and paint furiously in her studio.

As Eve’s coordination grew, the toddler took up residence next to her mother, playing with paint at first just to enjoy the texture but then eventually painting on her own canvases. Ruth couldn’t wait for Eve to be old enough to collaborate with her . . . until she realized that she already was.

“She would frequently ‘add’ to my pieces, and one day I looked at one of her drawings,” Ruth says, “and in the scribbles, I saw two people standing by the shore.”

Ruth used watercolors to fill in Eve’s vision, and their first painting, The Red Boat, came to life. The pair has become an international sensation celebrated from Austria to South Korea for their whimsical portraits. Eve begins each sketch on her own, usually with an ink pen, and her mother fills in the details and color based on the little girl’s stories, songs, and daily activities.

 

Eve’s drawing, and the collaborative result: The Red Boat by Ruth and Eve Oosterman.

 

Each of us brings a similar and unique set of brushes to fill in what we see. If someone else tried to complete Eve’s drawings, the results would certainly differ from her mother’s. Ruth is partial to and proficient in watercolors, and that determines how she interprets the sketches. Someone like me, who has no artistic ability, would most likely use other materials—I don’t even own watercolors—and produce another sort of image entirely.

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 perceptual 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.

 

OUR PERCEPTUAL FILTERS

 

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’ve gathered differently.

Perception is how we interpret the information we gather during observation; think of it as an internal filter. It can color, cloud, or change what really exists into what we think we are seeing.

Much like seeing, the process of perceiving is subtle, automatic, and hard to recognize if we’re not consciously aware of it. Want to feel it right now? Look back at the black-and-white photograph on page 37. Now try not to see the cow. It’s impossible. You can unfocus your eyes or turn the page around, but you will not be able to not see the cow now. Why? The power of your new knowledge—that it is a cow—has effectively erased your previous perceptions.

This is indicative of the experience we have every time we see, don’t see, and can’t un-see something. Being aware of how easily our perceptions can change, and refuse to un-change, can help us to be attuned to them.

Our perceptive filter is shaped by our own unique experiences in the world. Everyone’s is different from everyone else’s, sometimes wildly so.

Claire, a lawyer in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, lived just two blocks from the World Trade Center with her husband, Matt, and their three children. On the morning of 9/11 they evacuated together, grabbing what few possessions they could and hopping onto a van to New Jersey, where they lived for the next several weeks. A few months later, her husband’s uncle, an author, talked to her and her husband separately about their experiences on that day and wrote up their two accounts.

Claire was shocked when she read them. Even though she and her husband were together the entire time, in the same place, before, during, and after the attack, and left New York at the same moment, you would never have believed from reading the narrative that they lived through the same experience. They didn’t recall the same things, and the things they did both recall, they didn’t see the same way. While Claire remembered looking through their ash-splattered apartment window and seeing people getting trampled in the street and struck by falling objects, Matt recalled that the window was blacked out completely and that he didn’t look and didn’t want to look outside. When they decided to move outside into the hallway, Claire talked about her children needing snacks and sweaters, while Matt focused on the elderly residents who needed chairs. Matt thought the falling towers might crush them; Claire was sure the smoke would kill them.

It wasn’t just their recounting of the events that was different, their emotional responses were too. Claire called colleagues nearby and begged, pleaded, and cried for help. Matt was “dead calm.” Matt spoke to his uncle on the phone but doesn’t remember their conversation; Claire can still recall every word of the good-bye call she placed to her father in Oregon.

The published account of their “reflections on terror and loss” still resonates with her as a firsthand example of how your own perceptions of a situation are just that—your own—and of the fact that you can never assume other people experience anything the same way you do, even if you are right there with them.

If two parents who are the same age, and came from the same race, socioeconomic class, and physical location, don’t see things the same way, think of how differently disparate people do: employers and employees, defenders and prosecutors, Republicans and Democrats, teachers and students, doctors and patients, caregivers and children. What we see might be completely different from what the person right next to us, let alone the person across the room, on the other end of the telephone, or the other side of the world sees. What might be apparent to us someone else might overlook entirely.

When I’m in Washington, DC, there’s a work in the Smithsonian American Art Museum that I often use with my classes. It’s a 9-foot-by-6-foot painting of a black girl sitting on the floor at the top of a set of stairs near a bookcase. Over the girl’s head are two translucent cloud shapes with the same set of three letters in each: “SOB . . .”

While many people’s first assumption is that SOB is a cry of despair or sadness, the girl’s mouth is set, her eyes dry. I challenge my class: could SOB mean something else? We don’t have a definitive answer. The title of the work by Kerry James Marshall is simply SOB, SOB.

Each person brings along his or her own unique experience, history, education, background, and viewpoint. Medical professionals have told me SOB means “shortness of breath,” while maintenance crews claim it’s “son of the boss.” For Texan law enforcement agents, SOB stands for “south of the border.” To Long Islanders, SOB is New York State Route 135, the Seaford–Oyster Bay Expressway. My favorite is the mother of a teenage texter who said that while SOB was an acronym for “son of a bitch” when she was younger and referred mostly to males, today’s kids use it exclusively for girls and mean it as “self-obsessed bitch.”

For success with anything—a case, a collaboration, or a new client—you cannot rely on someone else seeing or interpreting things the way you do. If you stop inquiring with your own interpretation of what you see, you could be missing untold information. If when viewing the black-and-white image presented by Apollo Robbins I got up and left right after I concluded that I saw a platypus, I might never have learned that the photograph really showed a cow. And if I relayed my experience to others as fact—“and then Apollo Robbins showed us a photo of a platypus”—I would be spreading incorrect information. To get the most accurate picture of anything, we need to see others’ perceptions and recognize others’ points of view.

How do we find out what other people see or think they see? We don’t have to look any further than public art, especially contemporary sculptures and installations, and the very public reaction to it.

When South African artist Jane Alexander’s exhibit Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) was on view at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York in April 2013, I was excited to go and see it for myself. Half human, half beast, mostly naked statues were installed in front of altars, in the nave, in courtyards, and on windowsills. There was a young boy with the face of an ape, a dog-headed man, a long-beaked bird without wings, and a feline-faced female wearing a white gown and a gold tiara whose arms ended in stumps. Some creatures sat on ammunition boxes; others were blindfolded, bound, and dragging machetes and toy trucks on the end of ropes.

While my experience of meeting these strange sculptures in a place normally reserved for prayer and spiritual repose was definitely extraordinary, the observations I’ve listed are objective. Not everyone’s were, however. The exhibit was met by equal parts delight and disgust. While the New York Times praised the show as “wonderful”and “uncannily beautiful” and believed “the cathedral setting couldn’t be more perfect,” other critics found the exhibit “subversive,” “disturbing,” and “off-putting considering it was in a house of worship.”

 

Jane Alexander’s installation Infantry with beast, at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, 2008–2010.

 

Of course not everyone is going to like the same things—we are all subjective beings—but what’s important to note is that our subjectivity can color the “truth” of what we see. While every visitor looked at the same setup, they all saw different things. A rusted sickle was seen by some as a sign of fertility and by others as one of destruction. Which was right? Neither. Unless the curved blade was marked as one or the other, and it wasn’t, neither can be proven. The only objective and accurate answer is that the rusted sickle is a rusted sickle. To call it anything different is to alter the facts.

Look at the photograph of Alexander’s work on page 44. What do you see? What stands out to you?

Now think about how various people’s answers might differ based on their experience, priorities, or even profession. A frequent churchgoer might focus on the ornate relief in the background, while a retailer might zero in on the statues’ footwear. A student of anthropology would look at it differently from someone with a fear of dogs. Perception is also shaped by a person’s values, upbringing, and culture. Our natural inclination to either notice the canine-headed, human-bodied forms’ nudity or avert our gaze from it could affect whether or not we see that the creatures’ arms are unnaturally long. What would a medical professional have to say about the statues’ ribs? Or an organizational consultant about the straightness of the group’s lines? More important, would they notice each other’s focus—would the physician notice the lines and the consultant see the ribs?

Since we live and work with all different types of people, we need to be attuned to how others might see something. To test our awareness of others’ perceptions, let’s look at a photo of another sculpture installation, on page 46. How would you describe this statue’s expression? How do you think a probation officer would describe it? Since most probation and parole violations often involve drugs, he might see the sculpture’s closed eyes, slack mouth, and lazily tilted-back head as an indication of being under the influence. What about a victim of sexual assault? She might see the sculpture’s head as deliberately cocked back rather than tilted, eyes momentarily closed and mouth opened as a prelude to a threatening situation.

 

Tony Matelli, Sleepwalker, 2014.

 

Tony Matelli’s February 2014 installation of a realistic-looking man in his underwear on the Wellesley College campus elicited a divisive uproar that was covered everywhere from Time magazine to the International Business Times in India. Reactions ranged from a parody Twitter account to protests and petitions against it. While some viewers found the statue comical and were openly amused, dressing it in hats and costumes, others found it so frightening that they demanded its removal. Some saw the statue as a lost, sympathetic figure, others as a threatening attacker.

This artwork is a not a performance piece. It is an inanimate structure made of painted bronze. In its still facial expression, some see melancholy, others menace.

The artist himself is an unwitting example of how even though we know that everyone sees things differently, we still don’t always believe it. While Matelli concedes, “Each person comes to an artwork with their own history, their own politics, their own hopes and fears and all that stuff,” he goes on to surmise, “I think people might be seeing things in that work that just aren’t there.”

The artist might not have intentionally infused his work with emotion, politics, or innuendo, but people still see what they see. We will never all see the same way, but the challenges that come with that are mitigated when we acknowledge our visual disparity instead of insisting it doesn’t exist.

Simply knowing how many things shape perception and that perception shapes what we see can help alleviate miscommunication and misunderstanding, preventing us from getting upset with others when they don’t see things the way we do. The fact is, they don’t. They can’t. No one can see things like you do except you.

 

SEEING THROUGH OUR SUBCONSCIOUS FILTERS

 

Since we all see reality through powerful but almost imperceptible perceptual filters, we must compensate for them to get a more accurate picture of the facts of life. We can do so the same way we can improve our active observation skills: with practice.

Just as our ability to consciously process what we see and think is entirely dependent upon our brain’s neural connections, the same is true for things that dwell in our subconscious. Every bit of information, whether we sense it or not, is passed along our neural pathways, pathways that can be strengthened or rewired. These connections are so powerful and yet so malleable, just thinking about something like motion can promote actual physical change.

Experimenters at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, conducted a study in which people increased the strength in their fingers by 35 percent solely by mental training—imagining exercising their finger fifteen minutes a day for twelve weeks—and not any real physical movement. The muscle gain without moving was possible because the mental rehearsal of movements activates the same cortical areas of the brain as physical movement. Similarly, mental practice can influence processes controlled subconsciously because they share the same neural circuits. Scientists at the University of Oslo found that although people cannot adjust the size of their eyes’ pupils voluntarily, their pupils would constrict by as much as 87 percent when they thought about an imaginary light.

We can work on avoiding our own subconscious pitfalls—such as perceptual filters—by bringing them into our consciousness, which happens as soon as we pay attention to them. The moment we become aware of a normally subconscious process, it crosses into our consciousness. Once these filters are exposed to our awareness, we can address them, sort through them, and overcome them if necessary. After we have perfected this new skill, it will itself become a subconscious process; we will be able to observe things through our perceptive filters and find the salient facts automatically. We know this is true because we all once learned to tie our shoes. At first the process required active thought and concentration, but after some practice it became an action we could perform without thinking, indeed even with our eyes closed.

Let’s begin sorting through our own personal perceptual filters by examining them more closely. Take a few moments to think about what might unintentionally be coloring the things you see. For instance, analyze your own reaction to the Matelli sculpture. How does it make you feel? Amused? Offended? Ambivalent? There’s no right or wrong answer; we all feel how we feel. How would you feel if you saw someone defacing it with spray paint? If you saw someone crying next to it?

How we innately feel about something is informed by our personal experiences, which in turn contribute to our perceptual filters—filters that distort or enhance the way we see. To uncover yours, as you imagine each scenario ask yourself the following questions about Sleepwalker, and if the answer is yes for any of them, note what the specifics might be.

 

Am I being influenced by . . .

• my own experiences or the experiences of those close to me?

• my geographic history, affinity, or present location?

• my values, morals, culture, or religious beliefs?

• my upbringing or education?

• my professional desires, ambitions, or failures?

• my personal desires, ambitions, or failures?

• my inherent likes and dislikes?

• my financial experience or outlook?

• my political beliefs?

• my physical state (illness, height, weight, et cetera)?

• my current mood?

• groups I identify with and organizations I belong to?

• media that I’ve consumed: books, television, websites?

• information or impressions passed on to me by a friend or colleague?

To help get you started, I’ve shared my own answers to the exercise below:

 

How does the Matelli sculpture make me feel?

Slightly uncomfortable because it is so realistic-looking. I’m not threatened by it personally, but I can understand how some people might be.

 

How would I feel if I saw someone defacing it with spray paint?

I would be upset because I consider it vandalism to deface a work of art and I don’t think it is an acceptable way to express your difference of opinion.

 

How would I feel if I saw someone crying next to it?

Concerned, although I would find it hard to believe that the person crying was upset because of the sculpture.

 

Am I being influenced by . . .

 

. . . my own experiences or the experiences of those close to me?

YES—I’m thinking about a close friend of mine from high school who after being dropped off by her boyfriend after a date stumbled upon a strange man waiting for her in her garage. He tried to rape her, but she was able to escape him by biting off the tip of his finger. Now I’m thinking of another friend from high school whose older sister was not so lucky and was unable to fend off a rapist who attacked her at her job in the back of a Christian bookstore. Now I’m thinking of a college professor who was raped on a bicycle ride in the French countryside, and the daughter of a dear friend who was attacked walking home to her dorm in college. That I can recall so many instances of sexual violence against women so quickly is profoundly disturbing to me and makes me understand the questions about the appropriateness of placing this sculpture on a women’s college campus. I might not agree, but I understand why the issues were raised.

 

. . . my geographic history, affinity, or present location?

YES—I’m in my office, safe and sound, far away from the sculpture. That’s probably why it’s easy to think it isn’t threatening to me, because I’m not in front of it. If I were, and saw that it was life-size, perhaps even taller than me, it might change my perception of it.

 

. . . my values, morals, culture, or religious beliefs?

NO

 

. . . my upbringing or education?

YES—I have an art history degree and have worked in and around art for many years, so I’m probably more familiar with sculpture than the average person. This might make me less emotional about the sculpture than someone without a similar background.

 

. . . my professional desires, ambitions, or failures?

NO

 

. . . my personal desires, ambitions, or failures?

NO

 

. . . my inherent likes and dislikes?

YES—I hate to admit it, but I’m just not a huge fan of bald men. It might just be a matter of personal taste and aesthetics, but I’m admitting it so I can consider how it might affect my perception of this sculpture.

 

. . . my financial experience or outlook?

NO

 

. . . my political beliefs?

NO

 

. . . my physical state (illness, height, weight, et cetera)?

YES—I am an average-size female, and the sculpture is a life-size, average-size male. I might have a very different reaction to the piece if I were a male.

 

. . . my current mood?

NO

 

. . . groups I identify with and organizations I belong to?

NO

 

. . . media that I’ve consumed: books, television, websites?

YES—I’ve read quite a few articles about the Matelli sculpture outcry, including the original petition from some of the students.

 

. . . information or impressions passed on to me by a friend or colleague?

YES—I had a friend tell me she thought the statue was “creepy,” a word I probably wouldn’t have used to describe it.

 

* * *

 

The more familiar we are with what might alter our observations, the more astute and accurate they will be. When you’re asked to report objectively on something, ask yourself if you are reporting raw observational data or assumptions about observational data drawn after running it through the filter of your own personal experience.

Observation is a study of facts. We know that we have perceptual filters that can color or cloud what we see, and we know that others have their own filters, but what we want to cull are facts. Sometimes our perceptual filters disguise opinions as facts, such as with Matelli’s half-naked man sculpture. A viewer who had experienced trauma might see the statue’s raised hands as aggressive. A Walking Dead fan might describe the statue as a zombie. Neither is a fact. A correct description: the statue’s hands are raised, arms outstretched. Is the statue lost or lustful? Neither. It is a bald man in his briefs. Saying you find him creepy is subjective. Explaining the objective reasons why you find him creepy could reveal facts that are useful to someone who thought the statue was merely funny.

When searching for facts, we need to separate subjective discoveries from objective ones, and we’ll study the concept of the subjective versus the objective more thoroughly in the next chapter. Here I want to emphasize that subjective filters and their subjective findings aren’t necessarily useless. We don’t need to toss them out automatically. Instead, use the way other people look at things to lead you to new facts you might have missed otherwise. If coaxed, perhaps I would reveal that I was disturbed by the length of the statue’s fingernails. Another observer could use my revelation to examine a part of the sculpture she might have missed. Someone who owns a gym might point out the statue’s distended belly, while a podiatrist or someone with foot pain might point out the statue’s odd posture. A six-year-old would focus on different aspects of the statue than the owners of the Hanes company. To mine the most information possible, don’t close your eyes to anything, even someone else’s subjectivity.

 

MOST COMMON PERCEPTUAL FILTERS

 

While we are all prone to subjectivity in our initial inspection of anything, we are especially vulnerable when we need to glean specific information to fulfill our personal or professional desires. Whether you look for a living or you’re just studying a single occurrence, make sure you’re not seeing something just because you want to see it or because it’s your job to find it.

 

Seeing What We Want to See

This very common filter goes by many different names, including cognitive bias, confirmation bias, myside bias, wishful seeing, and tunnel vision. It puts us at risk of gathering information selectively, subconsciously seeking data that support our expectations and ignoring those that don’t. It’s a common trap in many fields. You can see it when police officers engage in racial profiling, when journalists only interview experts who support their initial opinion about a topic, when academics construct case studies to support their hypotheses, and when managers conducting employee evaluations only focus on performance events that uphold their preexisting opinion of an employee. Parents do the same thing, struggling to accurately assess their child’s aberrant behavior.

We find personal proof that wishful seeing shapes our perceptual experience in “frequency illusion,” which occurs when we first learn about something and then suddenly see it everywhere—for instance, when you buy a new car and then see that same car everywhere. More of that particular vehicle didn’t just flood the roads, you just didn’t notice them before. By the end of this book, the same thing is likely to occur with art. After being asked to pay close attention to works of art, you might start to see images of art everywhere: in cereal advertisements, on umbrellas and laptop covers. The frequency of your encounters with artworks won’t have mysteriously increased; those images were always there. You only start to notice them because they align with your new observation-skills enhancement, and you’ve stopped blocking them out.

While confirmation bias is relatively easy to comprehend from the wide angle of wish fulfillment—she desperately wanted it to be true, so she saw things that way—it is less well known that our preferences can also change the way we see the minute, material qualities of things, especially in relation to size, length, or distance. In experiments around the world, researchers have found that our desires make things seem physically larger or closer than they really are. In the Netherlands, subjects were asked to guess the size of a chocolate muffin; dieters estimated that the muffin was much bigger than non-dieters did because it was something the calorie counters were craving. In New York, subjects were shown a water bottle and asked how close it was to them; thirsty participants reported that the beverage was closer than others did.

While the tendency to see what we believe is largely unconscious, we can reduce its effect simply by knowing that expecting a certain outcome predisposes us to look harder for evidence that supports that expectation. Confirmation bias is especially prevalent with data that give us a sense of self-verification or self-enhancement. To make sure you aren’t mistaking your desires for facts, ask yourself two questions: “Is this information consistent with what I initially thought?” and “Does this information benefit me personally or professionally?” Your findings may still be factual even if you answer yes to either question, but by addressing your expectations up front, you can add more transparency to your information-gathering process.

 

Seeing What We’re Told to See

Sometimes other people can add perceptual filters to our own observations. The integrity of our search for facts can be compromised when we look for what we think we need to find. If before I had shown you the photograph, I had told you that Jane Alexander’s exhibit at Saint John the Divine was being censured for obscenity, you probably would have noticed the canine-human statues’ nudity much more quickly than if I hadn’t. If I had told you a story about a man who smuggled illegal jewels in his underwear before I showed you the photograph of Tony Matelli’s sculpture, you would have focused on his attire and any bulges therein more readily than if I hadn’t. Even if we don’t realize it, we often see what we’re told to see.

To offset this, pay special attention to any outside suggestions or restrictions that might be placed on your observation skills. I had a student at the University of Virginia School of Nursing come up to me following a presentation and confess that she found the common medical practice of “charting by exception” unduly constraining. Meant to streamline medical record keeping and make it easier to quickly review trends, charting by exception instructs personnel to document only unusual findings or exceptions to the norm. As a result, doctors and nurses are tempted to limit what they look for, especially if the chart is already filled with WDLs (“within defined limits”) from previous shift workers.

Don’t go right to the chart; go right to the patient. How does the patient look? What is the patient’s reaction to you? Apply the same principle to any form or evaluation or standardized report in any field. Be careful not to let it box you in. Your initial observation should be as unbiased and unlimited as possible. If a manager is fixated on following a form for evaluating an employee’s punctuality or profitability, she might miss other telling benchmarks such as the employee’s attire, demeanor, or body language. Look beyond the list. Focusing all of our attention on benchmarks and checking off boxes will inhibit a complete and accurate analysis from the start.

This is one reason why I don’t allow participants in my class to read the labels next to works of art when we’re in a museum and why I don’t mention the name of the artist or work in this book right away: because labels shape opinions and create prejudice. If I had immediately told you that the black-and-white photograph on page 37 was called Renshaw’s Cow, you would have missed the experience of looking at the image unfettered and the lesson you learned from the difficulty of identifying the cow. If you’d known Tony Matelli’s sculpture was entitled Sleepwalker, you might have had trouble imagining the man as an active intruder or understanding how someone else might see him that way.

In a group of government agents I took to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while standing beside a sculpture of smooth, round balls stacked in a pyramid and cracked half open with faces inside, one person reported seeing new life coming out of eggs, another saw death masks inside cannonballs, while someone else said the spheres reminded him of buckeye candy, spoonfuls of peanut butter half dipped in chocolate. Had they known ahead of time that the piece was titled In Memoriam, every observation would have been slanted in the direction of loss and war. Instead we got a more honest range of input and learned that the third observer hailed from Ohio and felt hungry. Is this sort of information relevant or useful? It certainly could be. It opened a door of personal experience in an otherwise impersonal setting, allowing this man’s coworkers to view him in a way they never had before—as a small boy in his mother’s midwestern kitchen.

To get a complete and accurate picture of anything, we need to aggregate all possible information and as many perspectives as possible so we can then sort through, prioritize, and make sense of it. Labels and prewritten accounts and existing information can then be included in our collection, but only after we have looked on our own first. So here’s the order:

 

Look first

↓

Consult other preexisting information or opinions

↓

Look again

 

We’re basically looking at things twice: first without any external influence, and then with a view informed by new data. You first experienced the photo at the beginning of this chapter for yourself, with no outside influence. Now that you have more information—that it’s called Renshaw’s Cow—go back to page 37 and look at it again. Does the name mean anything to you or sound familiar in any way? Renshaw is in fact the same Samuel Renshaw mentioned in the previous chapter, the vision expert whose system for recognizing aircraft at a glance was used to train 285,000 preflight cadets during World War II.

Renshaw used to spring the poorly developed bovine print on visitors to his Ohio State University lab and ask them to guess what it was. Nearly every adult got it wrong. One reporter investigating Renshaw’s contribution to the war effort was confident it was a map of Europe, thus exposing his confirmation bias. In contrast, every small child Renshaw ever showed it to identified it immediately as a cow. Why? With fewer years of experience and a natural penchant for not listening, children don’t have as many perceptive filters obstructing their view.

 

Not Seeing Change

The final entry in our triad of prevailing perceptual filters is change blindness, the failure to notice fluctuations in our visual field. Both the psychologist behind the “invisible gorilla” experiment and our friend the Gentleman Thief have staged dramatic, public displays of how easily we can fall prey to this perceptual malady.

Daniel Simons and his colleagues staged an experiment during which someone would approach pedestrians at a university and ask for directions. While they were talking, two men carrying an opaque door crossed in between them, at which time the person asking directions was replaced with someone new. Only 50 percent of the people giving instructions noticed the switch. Apollo Robbins appears on and consults for the National Geographic television show Brain Games, which demonstrated change blindness through an episode set in a Las Vegas hotel. As guests talk with a hotel employee, he drops his pen, bends down behind the desk to pick it up, and is replaced by someone new. Fewer than half of the guests recognized the appearance of a new person.

Considering that our brain encounters an estimated eleven million bits of information each second and knowing the finite nature of what we can process and pay attention to, change blindness isn’t that surprising. One way of combating it is to recognize that everything changes constantly, even if those changes are too small for us to observe in real time. Think of a tree. You can’t see it grow, but it still does, maybe as slowly as an inch a year. You could pass by the same tree every day and think it looks the same, but what happens if you take a closer look?

 

Mark Hirsch, That Tree, March 14, 2012.

 

 

Mark Hirsch, That Tree, Day 320: February 6.

 

Mark Hirsch, That Tree, Day 51: May 13.

 

Mark Hirsch did. He drove by the same tree in Platteville, Wisconsin, every day for nineteen years. Although a photographer by trade, he’d never considered snapping a shot of the tree until he got a new iPhone. One January evening as he passed by the tree, shrouded in blowing snow, he pulled over and decided to christen his new phone’s tiny digital camera. He was so taken with the photograph of the towering bur oak rising from the edge of a cornfield that he documented the same tree every single day for a year.

Even though he lived just a mile away and had viewed it thousands of times, after taking the time to really look Hirsch discovered that the tree and its familiar valley were a “foreign land full of strange and wonderful discoveries.”

When we go into any situation thinking it’s going to be the same thing we’ve seen or done before, we’re putting up our own perceptual filter that will make any change even harder to find. The resulting blinders can cause us to miss important details, to go into autopilot, or worse, to become presumptuous about our expertise, abilities, or safety. And that’s when things can get dangerous. One of the detectives who attended my class admitted that he often thought, “I know exactly what this crime scene is going to look like,” before he even arrived to an investigation. It’s a natural inclination after years on the job, and we’re all tempted to do it. But we can’t. When doctors or police officers or teachers say, “I’ve seen this before,” they’re wrong. They may have seen or handled similar things or cases or people but not the new one in front of them; that one has never existed before. Think of Hirsch’s tree photographs: it might be the same tree, but the weather, the humidity, and the light won’t ever be exactly the same. The ladybug climbing up its bark has never gone exactly the same way with exactly the same steps at exactly the same time ever before.

No two jobs, classrooms, crime scenes, customers, students, patients, people, or problems are the same. There is no such thing as the same pneumonia, the same second-grader, or the same business deal. Every person and situation is unique. To treat them otherwise is to deceive them and ourselves.

 

THE ART OF ILLUSION

 

Illusionists and magicians take advantage of perceptual filters such as change blindness and confirmation bias to entertain us. Con artists and crooks do the same in order to fleece us. According to Apollo Robbins, the best defense against the latter is “the knowledge that you’re always vulnerable to a thief with the right skills.”

The same can be said of the tricks our brain can play on us; we are all vulnerable to our unconscious and ever-evolving filters. If we fail to acknowledge and examine them, they can hurt us. To arm ourselves against them, we must know them. Once we’re aware of our personal perceptual lenses, we can see past them.