Oct 31

The Power of Perception

A 42 year-old man watches Into the Wild with his father and sees a hurt and hopeful young man on an existential journey. The man’s father sees a movie about a naive kid who tried to survive in Alaska on his own without proper planning. A 2.5 year old girl looks down the hallway in broad daylight and sees the spooky forest. Her uncle looks down the hallway and sees four doors, one open to a messy bedroom. Who of the people mentioned perceives what is real and right?

Webster’s online dictionary calls perception “the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding. 2. immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation as, of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities; insight; intuition, discernment. 4. a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present. But, is such a shared and agreed awareness even possible? Minimally, generating one can be challenging.

The little girl is not expected to have astute physical senses and yet she sees something down the hall. Her adult caretakers take for granted that much of what she sees is not really there—except to her, of course. Her stuffed animals do not really talk to her, except that they do. There is no single unified awareness there. For the little girl those things are real, though, just like for the father the movie was just a movie about a capricious kid, and for the uncle the hallway was just a little-considered, functional pathway through a house. The fact is that these contradictory perceptions simultaneously sit beside one another, as do their perceivers each night at dinner.

Who Is Right?

The son watched the movie and perceived the young man’s journey as metaphorical, as connoting something bigger. The roads the son visually watched the protagonist take from Georgia to Alaska were not important per se. The story was about a young man’s search for the meaning of life, and testing himself in way similar to how ascetics test their bodies to achieve spiritual transcendence. His father initially described the movie as “a good movie.” His perception was not the same as his son’s, clearly, although they watched the same filmed images. In conversation, the father also saw of the protagonist as naïve, which was an interpretation, a conclusion, a drawn meaning, a perception that emerged by seeing into the movie’s possible meaning and not only looking at the moving images. The father’s latter summation was just as much a representation, just as much a mind-leap from watching to seeing into what was watched, just as much the result of a meaning-generative process, just as much an interpretation of what was actually viewed with the eyes pointed at the movie screen as was his son’s assessment of the protagonist’s actions as metaphorical of the life journey of all human beings. So, the father had two views, two perceptions of the same movie, and his son gained another perception of the protagonist as naïve. I wonder how many more perceptions there are.

Who Is Seeing Clearly?

When we observe carefully, we notice that in everyday life, in every domain, be it work, school, family, or platonic endeavors, we fill a great deal of our awake time, use much of our conversation, and employ a lot of our solo thinking in trying to figure out how much is really happening in a situation, whose “seeing” and points of view are most valuable, how much we see, what dynamics are illusions, how much more might be seeable, what we are missing, what our obligation is to see more, and, very often, how much of what we see we can filter out—all in an effort to decide how much information, if any, we must consider or act upon. These inquiries are at the heart of the challenge of perception.

The simplest aspect of perception is to take in, to register, to receive a stimulus with one’s senses. This is important and fundamental to optimal human functioning, for sure. But there is more potential in perception than in mere observation and stimulus receipt. Perception is not simply to register with eyes, for example. Seeing (or smelling, for that matter) may be a merely physical and unintended phenomenon. Perception is also a thing of interpretation. I see a flower I interpret as colored magenta. The color magenta is not innate to my mind. I did not have preconscious knowledge of it. It is learned as is your perception of, say, red. I might settle firmly on the experience of a magenta flower, and you might be equally firm on it being red. Who is right? Moreover, how do we reconcile the two views? Herein flashes the problematic nature of perception.

Looking At is Different from Seeing Into

In the case of the movie, I perceived a story as something else, a metaphor. What I watched was akin to something else. This interpretive level of perception is valuable. One is generally and complimentarily said to be perceptive for either seeing something physical others missed, or seeing something non-physical that others missed and agree could possibly exist. In both cases perception and perceptiveness is culturally valued. That value is hinted at in the way people refer to another’s perception. They often say, “That’s very perceptive of you,” with the tone of regard. And, the opposite, scoffing tone also implies a value of perception in our culture when someone says to another who pointed out the obvious, “How perceptive of you, Sherlock.”

In Sherlock Holmes lingo, perceiving is a combination of sensibly receiving and then drawing deductive and inductive connections between evidence and observations and something that may or must, by extended thinking, be as real as what is physically true. So, it is reasonable that we initially define perception as a recognition of something using a physical sense. That is a good start. What can that recognition do for us?

20 students watch a video in which 6 students, three in white t-shirts bounce a ball, and are told to count the number of bounces. Half the students see a black gorilla walk across the screen, half do not. Half perceived the gorilla, half did not. So what? The answer comes in what meaning, from sweet to sour, any or all of the students make of the gorilla’s perception by half the students, and the fact that half of them still did not have the image of the gorilla in their minds 10 minutes later because they did not actually see it. What might the gorilla’s simultaneous absence and presence mean? Ask ten students and you get many answers which show what is true of perception beyond merely seeing: it is variable. It is not easily fixed in a single interpretation. To perceive is not merely to physically validate. It is also to look into. So, perception includes both the physical scientist’s observation and the non-physical practitioner’s in-sight about the observation. What the perception of the gorilla or lack of it meant to everyone is a more important and challenging contemplation than whether the gorilla was physically present or not. Unless we go to this extra level of thinking we are only working to extend the use of our physical senses. But once we do go further, we are in the land of imprecise, multiple simultaneous meanings, and, hence, tricky interpersonal, scientific, and philosophical terrain.

40 eyes watched the video. 40 images of gorilla’s were received through 40 pupils and built on 40 retinas and only 20 actually “saw” the gorilla. A father and son watched a popular movie with two sets of eyes and came away with several different perceptions, several different meanings. A little girl is convinced of a spooky forest down the hall, and her uncle sees four doors.

Beware the (In)visible Gorilla

Perception is important, and problematic, not because it has only to do with physically missing or noticing a physical or immaterial object or phenomenon. Perception is problematic and rich with potential because what is perceived is then used to make sense. From that meaning action springs, be it conscious or unconscious. Indeed, even future involuntary action can be influenced by past perception just as past meaning influences future conceptualizations. For everyone who perceives something, that something exists, if only briefly. What is perceived leads to an ongoing relationship between meaning, affect, thought, and action.

Perception is no mere physical sensory ability or cultivated skill. It is one of the special attributes of the human mind. It is a primary gateway to the vast human experience. But, try to align multiple perceptions within one single mind, and try to align any, many, or all of them into a unified and shared awareness in many minds and the collective human experience gets very exciting indeed.