Introduction

AS I STOOD in the hallway outside the apartment, everything took on a hazy, slow-motion quality. Shouting echoed behind the door. Dust particles floated in the fluorescent light. A cat mewed from somewhere to my left. The officer in front of me raised his fist to knock, while his partner—tense, armed, ready for action—covered him. As the domestic dispute blared beyond the door, the black hole of the second officer’s gun barrel gaped like a silent scream. How had I gotten here?

Since I was little, I had seen the art in everything: in the beautiful asymmetry of sunlight streaming through the trees and the unique patterns of stones and shells left behind when the tide washed out. I was never a particularly creative person myself, but that didn’t stop me from studying art history. Following college, though, my upbringing by my scientist father and ultra-practical mother and a desire to serve led me to law school. And this particularly intense police ride-along.

To detach myself from the worry bubbling in my gut, I studied my surroundings as I would a painting, analyzing each nuance, taking stock of both foreground and back, trying to find meaning in small, seemingly incongruent details. I knew this was an unusual way to think—I’d been told so often enough—but I always found my art background useful in the practice of law, where the need to be an objective observer is critical.

And then I had a terrible thought: what if the officers I was with didn’t have these skills? What the first officer saw when the door opened—be it a crying baby, a confused elderly woman, or a gun-wielding madman—and how he conveyed it to his partner in that split second would affect the outcome for every one of us. My life was in the hands of a virtual stranger and his ability to see and accurately convey what he saw.

Thankfully the police were able to defuse the situation and my experience didn’t end in disaster, but as generally happens when we’re nose-to-nose with a deadly weapon for the first time or forced to face our own mortality, it haunted me for years after. How many times do our lives depend upon someone else’s observation skills? For most of us, it’s too many to count: whenever we get on an airplane or a train, into a taxicab, or onto an operating table. It’s not always life-or-death; sometimes it’s just life-altering. Other people’s attention to detail and follow-through can also affect our job, our reputation, our safety, and our success. And we can affect theirs. It’s a responsibility we shouldn’t take lightly, as it can mean the difference between a promotion and a demotion, between a triumph and a tragedy, between a normal Tuesday in September and 9/11.

Seeing clearly and communicating effectively are not rocket science; they’re straightforward skills. We’re born hardwired for both. But more often than we’d care to admit, we fail to use these skills. We show up at the wrong airport gate and try to board the wrong plane, we send an email to the wrong recipient saying something we never should have said, we miss a key piece of evidence that was staring us right in the face. Why? Because we’re hardwired for those errors as well.

Our brains can see only so much, and can process even less. I knew this from years of practicing law and witnessing firsthand the unreliability of eyewitnesses and the fallibility of first-person accounts, but it wasn’t until I followed my heart back to the art world that I began to actively investigate the mysteries of perception. As the head of education of The Frick Collection in New York City, I helped bring a course created by a dermatology professor at Yale to NYC medical schools, teaching students to analyze works of art in order to improve their patient observation skills. It was very successful—a clinical study found that the students who took the course had diagnostic skills that were 56 percent better than peers who didn’t—and I wanted to understand the science behind it. I wanted to know more about the mechanics of how we see and how simply looking at art could improve.

I became a neuroscience fanatic, reading all the research I could find and interviewing the researchers who’d conducted it. I even signed up for an online community neuroscience “video game.” And I discovered that while my own perceptions about how we see were wrong on many levels—apparently the retina is part of the brain, not the eye—they were spot-on in the most important ways: while we might not fully understand the human brain, we can change it. We can train our brains to see more, and to observe more accurately.

And as I often do when I learn something fantastic, I wanted to share it with everyone, not just medical students. I was out to dinner with friends sharing some of what I learned one night soon after 9/11, when the city was still reeling from the terrorist attacks and resulting stories of heroism and heartbreak. One of my friends asked if I had considered training first responders. I hadn’t, but as I thought back to my fear in the hallway on that law student ride-along, not knowing how the officers I was with would see or react to what they saw, it made perfect sense. I fell in love with the idea of pairing cops with Rembrandt; I just had to convince the law enforcement community. The following Monday I cold-called the NYPD.

“I’d like to bring your cops to our museum to look at art,” I told the bewildered deputy commissioner. I half expected him to hang up on me, but to his credit, he agreed to give it a try. Within a few weeks, we had weapons in the Frick for the first time ever, and The Art of Perception^® was born.

I’ve been teaching the class for fourteen years now, training officers from thirteen divisions of the NYPD, as well as the police departments in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Virginia State Police, and the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police. Word of the program’s effectiveness spread quickly, and my client list grew to include the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, Scotland Yard, the US Army, Navy, National Guard, Secret Service, and Marshal Service, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the National Park Service.

The Wall Street Journal soon profiled my class and its positive effects on the law enforcement, legal, and military sectors in a story about an undercover FBI agent who credited my training with helping him sharpen his observation skills. After taking The Art of Perception, the agent was able to collect incriminating evidence against a Mob-controlled garbage collection syndicate that resulted in thirty-four convictions and the government seizure of $60 to $100 million in assets. Almost immediately, I started getting calls from private companies, educational institutions, and even workers’ unions. Because in reality, all of us—parents, teachers, flight attendants, investment bankers, even doormen—are first responders on some level.

The Art of Perception’s unique pedagogy has been called “invaluable” by the Department of Defense and credited with “stimulating the innovative thinking necessary to generate viable future war-fighting concepts” by the chief of naval operations. After attending my seminar at an FBI National Academy program, Inspector Benjamin Naish arranged for me to present to the Philadelphia Police Department, stating, “I felt like I had my eyes opened wider [in this course, and I knew it was] the most unusual training they’re ever going to have a chance to see.”

What’s so unusual about it? I show pictures of naked women with breasts sagging on their stomachs and sculptures made from urinals to teach the fine art of accurate observation and effective communication.

And it works.

I’ve helped thousands of people from dozens of walks of life—law firms, libraries, auction houses, hospitals, universities, Fortune 500 companies, entertainment companies, banks, unions, and even churches—strengthen and sharpen their visual analysis and critical-thinking skills. And I can teach you.

Because medical and law enforcement professionals aren’t the only ones who need to know how to identify pertinent information, prioritize it, draw conclusions from it, and communicate it. We all do. A single missed detail or miscommunicated word can just as easily botch a cappuccino order, a million-dollar contract, or a murder investigation. I know because every week I stand in front of the best and the brightest and watch as they miss critical information . . . over and over again. No one is immune to this failure to see, not presidents or postal workers, not babysitters or brain surgeons.

And then I watch them get better. Whether I’m teaching customer service or information technology agents, artists or archivists, students or surveillance experts, people who are already very good at their jobs invariably get even better. I watch the transformation every single session, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to help you transform as well.

 

JR, Women Are Heroes, Kenya: Self-Portrait in a Woman’s Eye, Kenya, 2009.

 

This photograph is a self-portrait of the artist JR—or at least one perspective of him in someone else’s eye. JR had a problem in that he was becoming increasingly famous for his photographic portraits that were blown up to billboard size and attached to the tops and sides of buildings all over the world—to “put a human face to the most impoverished areas of the world”—but since he never got permits for them, warrants for his arrest had been issued in several countries. He was asked to create a self-portrait but was hesitant to show his facial attributes out of fear it might facilitate his arrest. His solution: Self-Portrait in a Woman’s Eye. I love this photograph because it encapsulates exactly what The Art of Perception is all about: shifting our perspective and our expectations further than we ever thought possible.

Think of this book as your new self-portrait. You can use it to step back and see yourself through new eyes. What do you look like to the world? How well do you communicate? How well do you observe? What’s behind you and around you and inside you?

From this book, you’ll learn how to sharpen your own inherent intelligence gathering, strategic and critical thinking, decision making, and formulation of inquiry skills using the amazing computer between your ears. Unlike other books by psychologists or reporters, though, this one will not just tell you what your brain can do or how people are using theirs to the limit, it will show you.

We’ll use the same interactive training I use to engage leaders around the globe. We’ll practice reconciling larger concepts with more specific details, articulating visual and sensory information, and conveying it in an objective and precise manner with the help of water lilies, women in corsets, and a nude or two.

Take a look at the photograph on the next page. It hasn’t been retouched or digitally altered; what you see actually existed this way. What do you think is going on in the photograph, and where was it taken?

 

Anna Schuleit Haber, Bloom: A Site-specific Installation, 2003.

 

The most common answer I get is flowers in an old abandoned building for some kind of art installation. And that’s partially correct. It is an old building, those are real flowers, and they were put there intentionally by an artist. What kind of building do you think it is? We see a hallway with many doors, and a window at the end of that hallway. People guess it’s an office building or some kind of school, but it’s not. It’s something most people never consider: a psychiatric hospital.

When the Massachusetts Mental Health Center was slated for demolition after ninety years in service to make way for more modern facilities, artist Anna Schuleit Haber commemorated its closing by filling it with what it had always lacked. (Sadly, she was inspired by her observation that patients in psychiatric hospitals rarely receive flowers, as there are no wishes for a speedy recovery.) Her resulting installation, Bloom, turns our thinking about mental health care upside down. We do not associate vibrant color with a deteriorating building or expect to see life oozing from the halls of a psychiatric facility. In the same way, this book will alter the way you observe the world. You will see color and light and detail and opportunity where you swore there were none. You will see life and possibility and truth in the emptiest spaces. You will see order and find answers in the most chaotic and messiest places. You will never see the same way again.

All of my requests for The Art of Perception live presentation come from enthusiastic referrals because once people’s eyes are opened, they can’t shut their mouths about it. They want everyone to experience the same revelation and reward. Past participants flood my email in-box with stories of how the training gave them more confidence in their jobs, helped them win promotions, improved their customer service, saved their companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, doubled and tripled their fund-raising outcomes, raised their standardized test scores, and even kept their children out of unnecessary special education classes.

Learning to see what matters can change your world as well. I invite you to open your eyes and see how. I bet you’ll discover you didn’t even know they were closed.