5

What’s Hiding in Plain Sight?

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

 

John Singleton Copley, Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773.

 

MEET MRS. JOHN WINTHROP. You can visit her “in person” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Mrs. Winthrop’s portrait was painted by John Singleton Copley in 1773 when she was married to her second husband, a professor at Harvard. The painting is notable for its realism and a perfect opportunity to practice objective surveillance. Take a few minutes to observe as much as you can about the who, what, where, and when of this scene.

Did you note the vibrant blue of her dress; the double white lace cuffs; the blue, black, and white striped bow on her chest; the red, black, and white striped bow on her cap; her brown hair with slight widow’s peak; the six strands of pearls wound around her neck; her multiple chins and her dimples; the red upholstery of the chair; her short, clean fingernails; the garnet and diamond ring on her left ring finger; and the nectarines she holds in her hands, one still attached to its branch?

Although this painting depicts a lone figure against a plain, dark backdrop, similar to the scene out the window in Hopper’s Automat, the detail here is exquisite, and it gives the attentive observer much more information about its subject than Hopper does. We can see varying textures in her bodice, the folds of skin at her wrist, and many glorious wrinkles on her face.

When cataloging what they see, many people miss one feature that is among the most compelling attributes of the painting: the mahogany table at which she is sitting. Did you see it at all? If you did, did you really study it? This prop is actually the painting’s tour de force and a testament to the artist’s technical skill. In it, the artist has painted a perfect reflection of Mrs. Winthrop’s skin, her fingers, the intricate lace patterns of her sleeves, even traces of the nectarine.

The table dominates almost the bottom third of the painting. It seems impossible that we could miss something so large, yet most of us do. In countless situations big and small, we overlook the “mahogany table,” and in doing so miss a crucial piece of information that is hiding in plain sight. The phenomenon is so common it has its own idiom—“If it were a snake, it would have bitten you”—and has been facetiously referred to as “refrigerator blindness” by the Canadian Medical Association Journal for where it frequently occurs. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve been looking right at the mayonnaise jar but didn’t see it.)

A couple of years ago I had to take my sister to the hospital for pain in her back. In the cubicle next to us lay a ninety-year-old man attached to a heart machine and an oxygen mask. Near him sat his wife; she and I started chatting as my sister faded into Valium happiness.

As we talked, two emergency room residents who looked to be in their mid-thirties came in and wheeled a very fancy machine up to the elderly man. Without saying a word or acknowledging our presence, they stuck patches on his chest, peered at images on the screen, and then talked very loudly to each other: “I wonder what caused this?” “I wonder how long the lungs have been functioning at this level.” “I would love to know the pulmonary history on this one.”

The patient’s wife politely interrupted them and said, “I can answer all of your questions.”

“Who are you?” they asked, startled, as if they’d just noticed her.

She answered, “I am his wife. This is our sixth time in the ER in as many months, and I can give you the whole history of his condition.”

One of the residents replied, “Oh, I didn’t see you when we came in. Tell us what you know.” The residents were so fixated on their machinery that they missed the patient’s entire case history, which sat before them—in plain sight.

When we miss things in plain sight—a patient’s wife, a mahogany table, a mayonnaise jar—it isn’t always as harmless as overlooking a condiment or a piece of furniture. In many instances, the thing we miss is obscuring other, key information we need to solve a problem, to make a diagnosis, or to crack a case.

On October 30, 2007, Linda Stein, a famous rock music manager and a real estate broker to the stars who counted Sting, Billy Joel, and Andy Warhol as longtime clients and friends, was found dead inside her Manhattan penthouse. The discovery rocked New York City not just because Stein’s death was ruled a homicide but because she lived in one of the city’s most secure buildings.

Stein’s eighteenth-floor apartment was accessible only by a private elevator hand-operated by an attendant, and every visitor had to be checked in and announced at a front desk where surveillance cameras recorded every arrival and departure. A stranger would not have had access to Stein in her own home.

Detectives found no sign of a break-in, and other than the pool of blood in which her body lay facedown, Stein’s apartment was clean. An autopsy determined that she had been bludgeoned between twenty-four and eighty times with a heavy stick, but no weapon was found at the scene. Stein hadn’t been molested, no significant property had been stolen, and she hadn’t sustained injuries consistent with a struggle. It appeared that Stein was killed by someone she knew, but who?

Records revealed that Stein had never left her building on the day she was murdered and had had just one visitor before her daughter discovered her body late that evening: her personal assistant, Natavia Lowery. Lowery had entered the building at 11:56 a.m. with only an envelope in her left hand, and had exited at 1:19 p.m. with a large red shopping bag hooked over her left elbow and an oversize green purse—Stein’s—slung over her left shoulder. Lowery admitted that she left with Stein’s wallet and cell phone, and after leaving the building alone, she answered Stein’s phone and told Stein’s ex-husband that her boss was “out running” in Central Park—odd, since Stein was suffering from breast cancer and a brain tumor that left her so weak she couldn’t lift her hair dryer on her own. Detectives discovered that Lowery had been stealing from her employer and had a criminal past. But stealing and lying don’t automatically make someone a murderer. Law enforcement needed something to confirm their suspicions, a fact that would prove Lowery’s guilt beyond any doubt.

Investigators thought the answer could be found in the raw surveillance footage of Lowery arriving at and leaving Stein’s building, but after hours of studying it frame by frame, they found nothing out of the ordinary. Yes, Lowery left with a bag and Stein’s personal effects, but personal assistants often do in the course of running errands and caring for their employer’s needs. What was inside the bags: dirty laundry or a bloody weapon? No one could see. Lowery’s exit was quick but unremarkable.

Late in the investigation, after the videotape had been seen countless times by those involved in the case, someone made the connection that Lowery’s pants had been turned inside out, thus no blood was evident when she exited the building. It seemed impossible, since so many people had examined the tape thoroughly, that they could have all missed such a crucial detail. Yet there it was: Lowery’s pants were totally different when she walked into the building than when she walked out. And the change wasn’t so subtle: Lowery was wearing cargo pants. The baggy pocket on her left thigh, visible when the pants were worn correctly, was missing on her exit. In its place darkly stitched seams stretched vertically along both legs.

It was possibly the break they’d been looking for. Lowery could lie about the contents of the bags she was carrying that were never recovered, but the fact remained: she had consciously turned her pants inside out when she left Linda Stein. There was no common or casual reason for it. Detectives surmised that Lowery had done it to hide bloodstains.

Stills from the video camera proving Lowery had turned her pants inside out were submitted during the trial as crucial evidence. The jury was convinced. Juror Kelly Newton said, “The pants were huge. It solidified the arguments.” Lowery was convicted and sentenced to twenty-seven years to life in prison.

How could investigators initially miss this essential detail? The same way we miss the mahogany table and the mayonnaise: because we’re wired to.

 

BIOLOGICALLY “BLIND”

 

While the names psychologists have for our ability to not see something we are looking at are many—inattentional blindness, attentional blindness, perceptual blindness, familiarity blindness, change blindness, et cetera—they share a commonality: blindness. For no physiological reason, sometimes we fail to see something that’s in our direct line of sight. We overlook things when they are unexpected or too familiar, when they blend in, and when they are too aberrant or abhorrent to imagine. However, our cognitive blind spots are not breakdowns in our visual processing system but rather a critical adaptive skill and a testament to our brain’s remarkable efficiency.

While the world is filled with limitless information and stimulation, our brain cannot, and should not, process everything we see. If it 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 all at once—dozens of flashing billboards, garishly lit buildings, flagpoles, taxis, shops, street performers, and some of the 330,000 people who pass through the same spot daily—but we do not “see” it all. Our brain automatically filters our surroundings and allows only a small percentage of information to pass through to protect us from an information overload that might otherwise paralyze us.

Consider what the modern brain manages as we walk down a street talking on the phone. Our body is navigating the pavement and potential obstacles; we are headed in a certain direction; we are noticing people and landmarks as we pass them, possibly interacting with them or making a mental note of something; we are carrying on a conversation with the person on the other end of the phone, talking, listening, responding; and we do it all effortlessly. We are only able because our brain has filtered out the unnecessary: the ants on the sidewalk, the breeze in the branches, the crumbs on the mustache of the man who just passed us. If we paid attention to every piece of information in our path, we wouldn’t get far past our front door.

Dr. Barbara Tversky, professor of psychology and education at Columbia University and professor emerita at Stanford University, explains, “The world is terribly confusing; there’s too much happening at the same time—visually, auditorily, everything—and the way we cope is by categorizing. We process the minimum we need in order to behave properly.”

The process of sorting out the pertinent or important from the inordinate amount of information received by our senses is quick, involuntary, and, scientists believe, somewhat unconscious. The brain scans information received from our environment until something captures its attention; only then is it uploaded into our consciousness. Since our capacity for attention is finite, only a relatively small amount of input is “realized.” Information that is not categorized passes through the brain unassimilated; it exists, but we don’t perceive it. Of course our failure to register something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The cowboy playing a guitar in his underwear in Times Square is there whether we “saw” him or not, just as the elderly patient’s wife was in the room and Natavia Lowery’s pants were inside out whether anyone saw them or not.

 

FILLING IN THE _______

 

This innate ability to filter also allows us to focus on the finite in the midst of multiple sensory inputs. Without it, we might not have thrived as a species. If a prehistoric hunter had to hide in tall grass waiting for a gazelle to wander by and he was fixated on every swaying blade in direct view, dinner might never be served. Being able to hone in on just a select amount of information in our chaotic world is why we can carry on a conversation in a crowded restaurant, drive a car while helping our children recite their multiplication facts, or play a sport in front of a screaming crowd. In the course of our daily lives we routinely perceive only what’s critical to our current situation, and we do it so expeditiously that we hardly notice the process.

“We need to quickly get to abstractions,” Tversky says, “to know what’s happening, to recognize the setting, major objects, actions, and activities of what we are seeing in order to act ourselves.” To do that, our brains “form fast, general categorizations of our surroundings.”

This instant organization of data, even with what we now know is incomplete information, is only possible because our brains are built to automatically fill in gaps for us. That we cna stlil reda wrods wtih jumbeld lettres and whn vwls r mssng without missing a beat proves this. This skill accounts for more than just why texting has replaced talking as the most common form of daily communication, though; historically, it has contributed to our survival.

Our friend the hunter might be ignoring the grass and focusing on a small gazelle that just wandered into his line of sight, but that doesn’t mean his brain wouldn’t receive and perceive a heavy rustling sound nearby. The sound alone could cause him to run without thinking, without confirming the presence of a predator, and save his life. The knowledge that rustling might mean a lion is filled in automatically by the brain, which doesn’t wait for permission before sending flight instructions.

In terms of self-preservation, our brain’s ability to bridge the gaps is quite useful, but in the modern world it can be a detriment when we’re not facing a life-or-death decision but just trying to employ first-class observation and communication skills. For instance, read the following sentence just once, counting all of the Fs as you go:

 

ARTIST FABIO FABBI PAINTED DO-

ZENS OF DEPICTIONS OF ORIENTAL

LIFE ALTHOUGH HE WAS OF ITA-

LIAN HERITAGE HIMSELF.

 

How many did you get? Four? Six? There are seven Fs in the sentence.

While some of us might have gotten it correct, the majority of us would not, since our quick-thinking brains filled in a V for the F in words like of, because that’s the sound the letter is making.

A similar version of this exercise (in which I’ll admit I initially saw two fewer letters than were there) made the rounds online several years ago labeled as either a “genius test” or an early Alzheimer’s indicator. It’s a far cry from either, but it is a good example of how our brains can trip us up even when we know what we’re looking for and we’re not hampered by any distractions. No matter how good we think our observation and perception skills are, the reality is that because of how we’ve evolved to cope in a complex world, we don’t see everything and we don’t perceive everything. While missing the Fs in a sentence might not seem like a crucial problem, in many cases what we fail to see is.

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF (NOT MISSING) DETAILS

 

Small details make a big difference. There is a huge difference between EST and PST when scheduling an important conference call, between picking up a child after soccer practice at 6:30 p.m. instead of 5:30, between 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon. Missing the important details in business can erode trust. Missing the important details in life can cause catastrophe.

The opposite is also true, however: finding and focusing on the details doesn’t just help avoid disaster, it can lead to success or the solution. Think of the billion-dollar companies built on their attention to detail. Apple didn’t come by its reputation for aesthetic perfection by accident. The company consciously sweats every detail from examining each pixel on a screen with a photographer’s loupe to employing a team of packaging designers who spend months perfecting the box-opening experience. Pioneering a new form of robotic animation, the trademarked Audio-Animatronics, wasn’t enough for Walt Disney. Even though his engineers told him it would be extremely difficult, he insisted that the tropical birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room and the presidents in the Hall of Presidents breathe and fidget and shuffle realistically even when not in the spotlight. “People can feel perfection,” Disney reasoned. It’s not a coincidence that the same airline ranked number one in customer satisfaction by the Institute of Customer Service, Virgin Atlantic, prides itself on small touches: complimentary amenity kits, kids’ entertainment backpacks, and even in-flight massages. The company even advertises its focus on its website: “We get all the details just right.”

Mastering the details will give you a competitive edge. Thoroughness and thoughtfulness are not core values for everyone, and if you make them a priority, they can help you stand out from the crowd of people who just don’t bother.

Once you hone your ability to tune in to telling details, you’ll also find that they are critical for good problem solving—whether you’re diagnosing a faulty catalytic converter on a car or trying to determine the correct answers on the SAT. The solution is often in the details we are programmed to overlook. Zeroing in on the things that others don’t see can be the difference between success and failure in all fields.

Marcus Sloan wasn’t as worried about the SAT as most high school math teachers might be. It was the New York State Regents Exam that had him up at night. Passing the mathematics portion is one of the requirements for a high school diploma, and the small, inner-city public school where he worked had a heartbreaking drop in its graduation rate in just one year, from 76 percent to 53.6 percent. He knew that if his students were going to break the cycle of poverty—the school classified 99 percent of its students as “economically disadvantaged”—they needed to graduate.

Walking through the Bronx school’s metal detectors every morning, Sloan knew he had his work cut out for him. An external audit found that students were disengaged and disrespectful—when they showed up. The school suffered from chronic absenteeism; average attendance was just 72 percent, compared with 90.5 percent for the city’s other similarly sized schools. Even worse: their scores on the Regents exam. While 77 percent of all the students in the state met the passing requirements for the mathematics portion of the exam, in Sloan’s school only 39 percent did.

The students in Sloan’s own classroom reflected this. “They had limited attention spans and trouble catching on to new concepts,” he recalls. But after completing his first year, Sloan concluded that the students’ poor grades weren’t due to their lack of intelligence. Instead he realized their problem-solving deficiencies came from their difficulty focusing on an extended task and attending to details, both necessities when solving multiple-step mathematical problems.

He explains, “On standardized tests, after eliminating one or two choices, these students would have difficulty identifying the necessary information provided in the question, or necessary inferences from that information, in order to select the correct answer. They would overlook the key pieces of information in the problem statements or try to use all of the information in the problem rather than selecting only the relevant details needed.”

He cites an example from the New York State Regents Exam administered on June 15, 2006. “One of the questions stated the angle of depression as measured from the top of a wall to a point on the ground at a given distance from the base of the wall. When I was grading their tests, I saw that many of my students had mistakenly used the angle of elevation instead of the given angle of depression,” he says. His classes had been practicing problems from previous Regents exams, many of them involving solving for angles of elevation. Missing the single word change from elevation to depression in their live exam resulted in an incorrect answer, regardless of the amount of work they showed or their mathematical ability to solve for either angle.

Sloan realized this simple but critical mistake—missing key details—was jeopardizing his students’ futures, and he was determined to fix it. He knew he’d need something out of the ordinary to reach his disenchanted charges.

“I wanted a creative means of engaging them in the kind of thinking that would enable them to succeed in mathematical learning,” he says.

He’d heard about my training for medical students at The Frick Collection in Manhattan and wanted to know if Vermeer might be able to help his struggling students.

“I thought if it could improve medical students’ diagnostic abilities, it might work for my high school students as well,” he recalls. “A keen sense of attention to detail is important to medicine, but it’s just as important in many other fields, including math.”

I wholeheartedly agreed, and visited Sloan’s school to introduce his students to the concepts of objective observation and searching for pertinent details with a slide show of selected pieces of art. A week later Sloan brought a group of his ninth- and tenth-graders to the Frick for a walk-through of the galleries. The students discussed the observational process and completed written exercises about the artworks they’d seen. We split the students into groups to study the art, then asked them to present their subgroup observations to the entire group to practice articulating their global and detailed observations.

The results were remarkable. They listened attentively, participated enthusiastically, and provided thoughtful responses to questions. Sloan marveled at the difference.

“I barely recognized some of them: they were alert, eager, even energetic,” he recalls. “It was exciting to see students who usually struggled with and often obstructed their own learning really get into the experience.”

Back in the classroom, Sloan noted that the students who took part in the museum training could more easily see connections in math problems than the students who had not.

We continued the program with two groups of math students from the high school, each visiting the museum on two different occasions. In written surveys following the course, the overwhelming majority of the students indicated that they had enjoyed closely observing the artwork and asked for more opportunities to do so. Almost two-thirds of the students taking the surveys wrote about the importance of looking for and focusing on details: exactly what Sloan wanted to instill in them. Even better: the percentage of students who met the mathematics standard on the Regents exam that year increased to 44 percent and climbed to 59 percent the following year.

Sloan had set out to solve a big problem: how to raise underperforming students’ scores on standardized tests. Every other teacher had tried the same approach—making students take practice tests—and it hadn’t worked. Those educators had missed the key detail that was hiding in plain sight: their students’ faces, unfocused and uninterested. Sloan saw this and knew that before he could throw more problem sets at them, he first needed to address their poor attitude and chronic inability to focus. The solution to the problem wasn’t in mathematics; it was in their mind-sets. Once they were engaged by the novel activity of looking at art, their eyes were opened to more of the details they were missing in their everyday lives.

 

DETAIL-ORIENTED

 

Knowing what we now know about how the brain processes and filters and misses and forgets and transforms, how can we become more detail-oriented? The first step is the easiest because we’ve already accomplished it: recognition.

We can’t fix something if we don’t know it’s broken. Dr. Marc Green, a psychologist and professor of ophthalmology at West Virginia Medical School, asserts, “Most people falsely believe that they seldom experience inattentional blindness because they are unaware of being unaware.” Now that we’re aware of our inbred blindness, we can work on consciously overcoming it.

Every automobile has a blind spot, the space we cannot see when we’re sitting behind the steering wheel. To make the seemingly invisible visible, we must first be aware of the issue, and then physically do a shoulder turn or mirror adjustment to compensate for it. The State Farm insurance company counsels new drivers that the only way to truly understand and then learn how to drive safely with blind spots is to spend time behind the wheel. The same concept applies to our other visual blind spots.

Perception requires attention, so we need to actively seek out the details. The more we observe art specifically for the details, the more we will see them. To help us learn to see the mahogany table hiding in plain sight, let’s go back and look at it. Turn to page 83 and study the mahogany table at which Mrs. Winthrop is sitting. What details on and around it can you find that you might not have noticed before?

Do you see the highlight along the beveled edge at the bottom left corner of the table? The wood grain running diagonally from northwest to southeast? What about the reflection of Mrs. Winthrop? We see the blue of her dress and the white of her lace sleeve, but we can also see the scalloped flounce of the shaped edge of the lace. The stem of the nectarine branch she holds is reflected on the tabletop; in fact it appears that she is holding it just millimeters above. Her arm is visible in the reflection, as are just her eight fingers. We cannot see her thumbs.

Look closely at Mrs. Winthrop’s hands. She was married to a prominent Harvard professor and one of America’s first notable astronomers. We can see her garnet and diamond wedding ring on her left ring finger; however, close examination of that hand in the mahogany table shows that the ring is missing.

If we had missed the mahogany table the first time around, we would have missed the vanishing wedding ring as well. And it’s a telling detail not to be missed, since the artist Copley, so diligent in his re-creation of the reflection in the mahogany table, would likely not leave out such an item accidentally. There are no records of why Copley omitted the ring in the table’s reflection. It could be a comment on the state of Mrs. Winthrop’s marriage, or it could simply be the artist playing a visual game with the viewer. We don’t need to know the significance of the missing ring to catalog its absence, but we must acknowledge it. If we don’t, we could be omitting crucial information we’ll need later. You never know when that one small detail will crack the case or provide the elusive answer.

Missing key details means missing the other important details they might lead to. When we see the mahogany table, we can then see the missing ring. When we see the patient’s wife at the end of his bed, we can then see a more thorough case history. When we see the inside-out pants, we can then see a conscious cover-up. The more we see, the better the odds that we, or someone else working with us, will uncover the solution previously eluding all of us.

 

DETAILS IN NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

 

Another place important information often hides in plain sight is in the physical cues that other people give us: body language. Nonverbal communication is so telling that police officers in high-crime neighborhoods are trained to not put their hands in their pockets because it sends a signal of authority or boredom, and officers should remain ready and alert.

Look at the way Mrs. Winthrop is holding the nectarine stem. It’s peculiarly arranged in her fingers, almost as if it were a writing instrument. Did the artist do this on purpose to leave us a clue about Mrs. Winthrop? If we did further investigation in this vein, we would find that Mrs. Winthrop was a prolific and expressive writer during the Revolutionary War; her letters, almanacs, and journals are archived at Harvard University for their importance as first-person sources.

When searching for details, be attuned to how someone is holding a nectarine stem. Note facial expression, posture, tone of voice, and eye contact. The way someone is standing, if she bites her bottom lip—these are facts that anyone can collect. I’m not a body language expert, but I have learned—by consciously looking for it—to have a heightened awareness of others’ nonverbal cues. I can tell if someone doesn’t want to talk to me—there is a conspicuous lack of eye contact, and the person might speak quickly to make his point and move on or away. A person who doesn’t want to engage in prolonged conversation tends to stand farther away from me. You don’t need to know the normal blink rate to note that someone can’t hold your gaze, but you’ll never see it if you never look a person in the eyes.

Bonnie Schultz, an insurance investigator for the State of New York, told me that after ten years on the job she can tell if someone is lying simply by observing body language.

“It’s the subtle things, but you can see them,” she said. “They’ll shift their eyes or won’t make eye contact at all. They’ll turn away slightly, or their shoulders will stiffen.”

I went to a spa recently to redeem a massage certificate I had gotten as a birthday gift. I had just walked into the darkly lit treatment room, and before I could say a word the therapist asked me if I was cold and whether my neck hurt. In those first few seconds while I was surveying my unfamiliar surroundings, the therapist had been surveying me. She had seen me glancing at the heater standing in the corner and nervously rubbing my neck—two tiny, unconscious actions. She delivered world-class customer service just by collecting details from my body language.

Marcus Sloan’s students didn’t hold up flash cards saying, “We’re bored.” And I didn’t voice my discomfort at the spa. Sloan and the massage therapist had to read those messages in our posture and our gaze. Not everyone is comfortable saying what they want or what they mean out loud, but if you tune in to the other ways people express it, you will win their business, their loyalty, and their trust.

 

STRATEGIES FOR SEEING

 

Aside from being aware and attentive, we can use a few other specific strategies to combat our unintentional visual lapses. Since some of my clients use code names for their work, I’ve decided to do the same to help us remember the steps. I call it COBRA, not just because it sounds cool but also because the king of snakes has excellent eyesight. Cobras have built-in night vision, can see prey from 330 feet away, and have a nasty habit of spitting venom exceedingly accurately right into their opponents’ eyes.

For our purposes, COBRA—which stands for Camouflaged, One, Break, Realign, Ask—will help us uncover hidden details by reminding us to concentrate on the camouflaged, work on one thing at a time, take a break, realign our expectations, and ask someone else to look with us.

 

Concentrate on the Camouflaged

Inconspicuous objects, such as the mahogany table, are harder for us to see because we have a natural, survival-based instinct to look for what stands out or is out of place. We have trouble noticing things that fade into the background or into the crowd or are naturally camouflaged, physically small, or subtle. While survivalists, soldiers, and criminals take advantage of this to blend in, the rest of us must work extra hard to spot what doesn’t automatically stand out.

Investigators didn’t see Natavia Lowery’s inside-out pants because at first glance they weren’t out of the ordinary. They expected her to be wearing pants, and the pants appeared clean, so perhaps they didn’t feel the need to look at her pants any longer. If Lowery had walked out of the building in just her underwear, that would have been unusual—it would have stood out, and most likely caused the investigators to spot it right away. If the elderly patient’s wife had electric-purple hair, the residents might have noticed her right away because the unusual hair would have caught their eye. Instead, the woman blended in with all the other people in the hospital.

We are drawn instinctually to the new, the innovative, and the exciting. To see the things that are truly hiding in plain sight because they appear ordinary, we must consciously look for the details our eyes might have skipped over on the first glance. To do this, we need to look again. We need to look at the entire scene, all the way to the edges and back again. Then, if possible, we must try to change the item or scene by repositioning it. Finally, we should reposition ourselves. Get closer, then step back. Walk around to change our perspective. An unusual angle can help uncover a not-so-unusual detail.

 

One Thing at a Time

To improve our chances of finding “hidden” details, we need to keep our focus sharp and single-minded, paying attention solely to this task. In our multitasking world where juggling multiple things at once is the norm, concentrating on just one thing can seem counterintuitive, but in reality multitasking leads to less effective and efficient work, since our brains cannot keep track of or focus on a million things at once. How many can we manage? A new study puts the limit of our working memory at a less-than-impressive four things.

Stanford professor Clifford Nass takes it one step further and argues that “multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking.” After using fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to study the brain while it was in juggling mode, he found that people who regularly multitasked were “terrible at ignoring irrelevant information, terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized, and terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Charles Folk, PhD, director of Villanova University’s Cognitive Science Program, explains why: “Any time you do a task—whether it’s visual, auditory or otherwise—it draws on a specific set of cognitive operations. The more tasks you perform, the more you draw from that limited pool of resources.”

When the brain is taxed with a heavy cognitive load, it lets more unfiltered information slip by than normal. So if investigators were filling out reports on a different crime and talking on the phone while looking at the surveillance footage of Linda Stein’s building, they would have dramatically decreased their chances of seeing the important details.

To avoid this multitasking brain drain, concentrate instead on just the task at hand. Called “mono-tasking” or “single-tasking,” the idea is now taking off in the business world. Set aside other distractions, close your computer, ignore your telephone, and just observe. It can be difficult in a world that demands multiple things from us at once—it’s been reported that average workers have thirty to one hundred projects on their agenda, are interrupted seven times an hour and distracted up to 2.1 hours a day—but Forbes magazine insists that “focus is a mental muscle that you have to develop, especially if yours has been weakened by years of multitasking.” This is one of the reasons I don’t allow phones in my class and enjoy taking people out of their offices. Without constant distractions hovering about, people can really focus on what they’re observing, and as a result, they see so much more.

 

Take a Break

Be sure when flexing your mono-tasking muscle that you don’t overdo it. The human brain was not designed to focus on one thing for hours at a time. To avoid overstimulation, our brains quickly become habituated to whatever’s in front of us. This is why we stop feeling the chair we’re sitting on or the clothes we’re wearing. This built-in filter also helps explain why we still don’t see “the mahogany table”—or our car keys or lost receipt or the way our budget could be balanced—that we know is there after staring and staring.

Psychologists believe that we can keep our cognitive control system from losing vigilance and help retain long-term focus by simply taking breaks. The formula recommended by experts is twofold. First, take a brief mental break every twenty minutes: just a momentary deactivation from your singular focus. The key is to pick an activity completely different from what you were doing. If you’ve been reading a report, don’t switch to reading emails, switch to something that uses a different set of skills, like talking to someone face-to-face. Second, relax for ten minutes for every ninety minutes worked. Take a walk, outside if possible; exercise, even if that means only doing at-your-desk yoga; do something that gives you pleasure; or take a power nap.

Excessive noise and sensory overload can also add to our brain’s stress and make it work less effectively. If the scene is noisy or crowded, consider returning later. Get yourself to a quiet location. (I highly recommend any nearby museum!)

Many famous people have found their famous solutions while taking a break. Sir Isaac Newton solved his obsession with gravity while watching an apple fall at his family’s home, where he retreated when the University of Cambridge shut down during an outbreak of the plague. In 1901, after weeks of struggling in vain, French mathematician Henri Poincaré found success for his mathematical proofs only after he left his worktable for a geological field trip and a day at the seashore. Analyzing his own success, he wrote, “Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work . . . It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness.”

When I take homicide detectives into museums, they are forced to step away from the challenges they face to gather sufficient evidence against suspects, to focus on something entirely outside the world of law enforcement, and ultimately, to think differently about what they do. Seeing things anew refreshes their perspective and often leads to the break that had previously eluded them. The same is true for anyone for whom studying art is a new and unusual activity. Unless your job is to stare at the exact paintings in this book all day every day, analyzing the art presented here will help “recharge” your brain as well.

 

Realign Your Expectations

We often miss the unexpected because we’re too focused on what we think should be there. Investigators were convinced that when Natavia Lowery left Linda Stein’s building carrying a large bag it contained the murder weapon. They studied the shape of it, the way it bulged at the bottom, how heavy it looked. During the trial, the lead prosecutor spoke of the footage showing Lowery leaving carrying a bag “heavily laden with something in it.” So much of the attention was on the bag, but it was the pants, in plain view, that appeared to convince the jury unequivocally of the suspect’s guilt. They were looking for a smoking gun (well, literally a bludgeoning instrument) instead of just looking.

This inherent expectation adds extra filters to our cognitive processing and can make us miss information our brains perceive to be irrelevant. Since we don’t “know” what our brain is filtering, we need to remind ourselves to let go of our preconceived notions and just look. And in some cases, we just might need to let someone else look.

 

Ask Someone Else to Look with You

Finally, since every person perceives the world differently, you might want to enlist help in your search. Bring someone in to look with fresh eyes, preferably someone with a different perspective, background, and opinions from yours.

I’ve found that people who don’t ask for assistance are often afraid doing so will make them seem incompetent, but I think the opposite is true. Someone else might see the answer to the problem that we articulated, and by seeking another set of eyes, we are proving that we are dedicated to the pursuit of a solution.

 

* * *

 

Dave Bliss knew the answer was in front of him, he just couldn’t see it. A sales manager for a commercial cleaning company, he had a huge new client on the hook, but one thing was standing in his way: the client’s current contract with a competitor.

The potential client was a medical services facility with forty buildings, a monster deal for Bliss’s company, and he was determined to close the deal. When Bliss had shown how switching to his company’s service would save $137,000 a year, the client was willing to sign up immediately. There was just one catch: the client was locked in a five-year agreement with another company and still had three years left.

“If you can find a way to get us out of this, I’ll sign,” the facilities manager told Bliss.

Bliss knew there had to be a loophole in the contract, but after staring at the tiny legal print for hours, he still hadn’t found it. The terms were pretty cut-and-dried; in fact, he’d highlighted the dates: “This agreement is effective as of the date of execution for a term of 60 months from date of installation.” The contract was signed on April 4, 2013, the services had begun a week later, and by all accounts they were acceptable.

Having recently taken my class, Bliss decided to try COBRA. He remembered the first step: camouflage. The answer could be right in front of him but hidden. He had spent the majority of his time trying to work out the dates and find a way out of the contract, but maybe that wasn’t the answer. Maybe he should concentrate on a different part of the document.

One thing at a time. Bliss turned his phone to voicemail so he wouldn’t be distracted, closed his laptop, and just looked.

Break. After twenty minutes, Bliss still hadn’t found anything, and the words were starting to swim on the page. He decided to get up and take a walk to the break room. He felt better when he returned to his office, buoyed by the change of scenery and leftover birthday cake he’d discovered.

Realign your expectations. What am I expecting to find? Bliss asked himself. A way out of the contract. Perhaps that’s the wrong expectation. Should I look for the opposite? he wondered. A way for the client to stay in the contract? Could the client somehow hire his company and still honor his current contract with the other?

Ask someone else to look with you. He called a friend who was an attorney.

“Is there any way for a company to honor their old contract and still use our services as well?” he asked.

“Sure,” the attorney replied. “Just figure out what the minimum requirements on the other contract are.”

Minimum requirements? Bliss’s company didn’t have minimum order requirements, he thought, but perhaps it should. A quick scan revealed the following under Article 12: “Minimum charge: $50 per service.”

There it was. The phrase that would win Bliss an $832,000 annual contract. To honor its commitment, the medical facility only had to use its current cleaning company for a minimum charge of $50 per service. Scaling its service back to cleaning one building one day a week would cost the company just $2,600 for the year and allow it to sign with Bliss for an annual savings of over $134,000. Bliss got the deal.

While it’s in our biology to miss things, we can use our cognitive powers to make sure the important details aren’t slipping through our filters unnoticed. Training our brains to be more effective at objective observation and perception will help us not only to see more but also to miss less.

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BIG PICTURE

 

As you master your ability to capture key details, be careful not to let the hunt for meaningful minutiae override other important information.

At 11:32 P.M. on a clear December night in 1972, as the pilots of Eastern Air Lines flight 401 were preparing to land the Lockheed Tristar jet at their home airport of Miami International after a smooth ride from JFK, the first officer noticed the landing-gear indicator light in the cockpit was dark. The captain, a thirty-two-year veteran who had logged more than 29,000 flight hours, radioed the control tower: “It looks like we’re gonna have to circle; we don’t have a light on yet.”

At a safe cruising altitude of 2,000 feet, the captain engaged the plane’s autopilot and set about determining why the square-shaped “down and locked” button beneath the gear handle wasn’t glowing green. Had it burned out, or was the landing gear really not locked into place? For the next seven minutes the cabin crew obsessed over the little light. They wiggled it, tried to remove it, cursed at it, worried about breaking it even more with a pair of pliers, cushioned it with a handkerchief, wondered if the button had worked during a previous test, twisted it, pushed on it, discussed how the light lens might have been assembled incorrectly, and tried everything they could to get it to light. And in the meantime, according to cockpit voice-recorder transcripts, they missed everything else.

At some point the captain leaned against the control column, the W-shaped “steering wheel” of the plane, possibly while turning to talk to someone behind him, switching the autopilot into hold-the-last-position mode. He didn’t notice that leaning against the yoke was sending the plane down. The jet went into a gentle descent over the Everglades. No one in the cockpit noticed. After the plane had lost 250 feet, an altitude warning sounded in the cockpit and also went unnoticed. The men were so engrossed with a $12 light bulb that they failed to notice until ten seconds before impact that they had steered the aircraft right into the ground.

After examining the wreckage, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the landing gear had been down and locked into place, and that the bulb in the landing-gear indicator button had indeed burned out. The pilots could have known this if they had correctly accessed the small viewing window under the flight deck that provides visual confirmation of the landing gear’s status; and even if the wheels were up, they could have been manually lowered. The flight could have landed safely if the pilots hadn’t been distracted by a button. Instead, 101 of the 176 passengers, including everyone in the cockpit, lost their lives in the crash.

We may be tempted to judge the pilots, but inattentional blindness happens to all of us. The cure for tunnel vision is the same as the strategies we should employ to combat our other unintentional visual lapses: Look in a different direction, look to the edges, take a break from your current activity, and step back to make sure you’re seeing the whole picture.

Educators believe that the students who best see the big picture—in both simple and complex systems—are visual learners. Likewise, studying art, a visual medium, forces us to use and sharpen our visual-spatial intelligence capabilities and ultimately can help us, too, to see the big picture more clearly.

 

PAINTING A PICTURE

 

Most of our communication about an event or incident takes place after it has occurred; we tell, text, email, and write what we have seen. In doing so, if we inadvertently omit a critical element, the recipient of our communication who was not present firsthand will never know the information was missing. As the primary source, we have a duty to include all of the important details while still capturing the big picture.

When I was a practicing attorney, to encourage us to relate a complete, detail-filled description that also incorporated the entire event—for judge and jury, who were not present—judges often asked us to think of information transfer as “painting a picture.” The same terminology is used to get stories out of witnesses, when child welfare workers must fill out a home-visit report, or when an insurance adjuster investigates a claim.

To “paint a picture” of what we see, we must first realize that we are starting with a blank canvas. Only what we purposefully put on it will be “seen” by others. We must not leave it empty or incomplete; rather we must fill it with accurate, objective, descriptive facts using both broad strokes and fine details to record our observations.

For instance, I work with family protective services investigators to help them describe the residence they’re visiting from the moment they pull up outside, not just from the front foyer. Is the grass overgrown? Is it near a busy or dangerous street? Is there trash piling up? Once inside, they should scan the entire environment. Is the floor clean? Are there animals about, and if so, do they look healthy and well cared for? What does the home smell like? Do the windows have curtains?

Then zero in on the details. What’s on the coffee table? A cup? A bent spoon? A cigarette lighter? A Bible? Paper and crayons? A porn magazine? This is not making judgments; it’s collecting facts.

When meeting children, look at their teeth. Are they clean or so decayed that it is evident the child has never been to a dentist? This small detail can tell a lot about the big picture of how well they are cared for.

I teach investigators to consider the reason they were called to visit someone—and then to look beyond. Focusing only on the reported incident could cause them to miss bigger warning signs in the home that could ultimately put a child at greater risk. The investigators need to diligently catalog the specifics but also have an appreciation for the rest of the family dynamics. In some cases, this practice leads to reward.

When caseworker Joanna Longley first visited a home in rural Pennsylvania to investigate a charge of possible child neglect, she noted all of the pertinent details of her visit in a report that painted a picture any other colleague could pick up and follow. The house had boards over a broken front window; the mailbox slot had duct tape covering it; and the woman who answered the front door and identified herself as the mother of the house refused to let Longley in. The mother displayed defensive body language as she wedged herself in the door’s small opening, she smelled of cigarette smoke, and she ignored Longley’s request for shelter from the snow that fell heavily overhead.

Although the mother was less than accommodating and Longley herself was far from comfortable, she stayed focused on the facts of the situation, not the subjective emotion behind the exchange. She also kept the bigger picture in mind, knowing that if she simply turned and left, the chance of a professional evaluation for the children left with her.

Instead of getting sidetracked by insult or injury, by cold toes or a client’s lousy attitude, Longley remained observant and objective. Her goal was to see the woman’s children in person, to note the details of their health, development, and appearance. While not ideal, this could be accomplished on the front porch. She briefly interviewed each child at the door and determined that they were not in immediate danger. Longley also looked hard at the facts to sort out her subjective observations. While the mother’s demeanor wasn’t polite, it wasn’t abusive either. Could her standoffishness stem from defensiveness? Perhaps she’d had a bad experience with authorities in the past. The mother was the adult of the house, it was her house, and she had a right to decide who could come inside.

Longley’s conscious decision to seek out the important details of the children’s safety while deferring to their mother’s wishes to do so outside paid off. By acknowledging the mother’s authority, Longley earned her trust and was welcomed inside on future visits. The mother even opened up and began to work with Longley to improve her children’s lives.

Let’s practice “painting a picture” with an actual painting, seeking out details big and small.

Look at the two side-by-side images below. For the sake of our blank canvas, let’s pretend we don’t recognize these gentlemen. We’ll call them #1 and #16. Using the investigative model we learned in the last chapter and a modern recording system of some kind to stay organized—pen and paper, smartphone, or Post-it note—complete an objective surveillance of the two scenes. Write down as many factual details as you can muster: the who, what, when, and where. Compare and contrast the two; for instance, #1 is standing while #16 is sitting, and both are presenting three-quarter profiles facing left. Ideally, you should spend two to five minutes on this exercise. Go.

 

#1. Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait), 1796. #16. Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln, 1865.

 

 

What did you find? Did you note the differences in dress? In background? In hair ownership? How about the similarity of their skin color or that they are both next to a table? Did you then include the differences in those tables, including height, location, and appearance?

What about body language? How would you describe their posture? In a class of intelligence analysts, I had one tell me that “number sixteen is passive, while number one is more open.” The word passive is subjective, open to interpretation. I pointed out that his colleague at the back of the room, an outgoing, animated guy, was sitting with arms held in the same way and yet we would never call him “passive.” Instead, try to be more objective and more specific: #1’s right hand is held out, palm up, while #16’s arms are in front of him, fingertips touching.

Did you list that #1 holds a sword in his left hand while #16 holds spectacles in his right?

Is there a line-of-sight difference? Where is each man looking?

How do their expressions vary? While I’m tempted to say that #16 is wearing a smirk, that’s another subjective inference. More specific would be: the corners of #16’s mouth are raised slightly. Other objective details could include that #16 has disheveled hair and bags under his eyes, his tie is crooked, and his suit is wrinkled. Just because he was a president of the United States doesn’t mean he isn’t a mess in this image. Acknowledge and make use of the human condition as you observe it. It’s valuable information that can contribute tremendously to the viewer’s overall impression of the portrait.

Now go back and search the two pictures specifically for details. List as many as you can find.

 

 

In recording the details, did you note the buckles on #1’s shoes or the watch chain hanging from #16’s vest? That the sword in #1’s hand is sheathed and the spectacles in #16’s hand are folded? Did you list the dust and scratches on the image on the right? The books stacked under the table in the image on the left—two large ones, almost the height of the subject’s knee, leaning against the gold table leg?

Did you see the rainbow in the upper right corner of #1’s portrait? If not, as with Renshaw’s Cow, I bet you can’t stop seeing it now. In many ways it’s the “mahogany table” of this picture: it’s hanging out in the background, doesn’t seem very significant, but it exists, so it is worth noting. In this case, it’s a telling detail: there are at least 25,000 paintings of George Washington in the history of American art, but only three have rainbows in them. Discovering it would help you place the time period of this work. It was painted in 1796, the last full year of Washington’s presidency. The rainbow was added to symbolize that America’s first president had brought the young country through the storms of the previous decades and that prosperous days were ahead.

If you missed the rainbow or the spectacles, the sheath or the oversize books, remember to engage COBRA when searching for details. Look specifically for things that might be camouflaged, concentrate on just the one task of looking, take a break and come back to the search, realign your expectations of what you thought you might see, and ask someone else to take a look with you.

Finally, what are the big-picture observations we shouldn’t miss in these two images? The things so “obvious” most people assume they don’t need to be noted? Step back and consider the facts that aren’t so small. One image is black-and-white, while one is color. Another big-picture fact that many people miss: one is a painting and one is a photograph. Everything must be noticed—just like Mrs. Winthrop’s mahogany table.

 

WHAT’S YOUR MAHOGANY TABLE?

 

The takeaway here isn’t that people miss shiny furniture, the patient’s wife at the end of the bed, the correct angle of elevation on a math test, or inside-out pants. It’s that those invisible-yet-visible things were, as they often are, the linchpins to success. Sometimes we’re so busy looking for the answer that we miss the information that can get us there.

To remind themselves not to miss what’s right in front of them, one group of executives I taught adopted the phrase “What’s your mahogany table?” There is a mahogany table (or more likely more than one) in all of our lives—something that could be instrumental to our work and we just don’t see it.

Look around you, your home, and your workplace, and ask yourself the same question. What’s your mahogany table; what can you find hiding in plain sight?

 

* * *

 

We’ve learned how to master the fine art of observation: to gather only facts, to sort the objective from the subjective, and to keep an eye out for both the small details and bigger, but sometimes hidden, information. Now we’re going to unleash our inner intelligence analyst and figure out how to make sense of what we’ve found.