Daily Excerpt: Typhoon Honey (Girrell & Sjogren) - Perception Is Not Reality
Perception Is Not Reality
In nearly
every liberal arts college offering psychology as a major, you can find an
advanced course labeled something like “Sensation and Perception.” This course
studies how the brain reads information sent to it from the five senses and how
these data are recognized and converted into thoughts, sensations, images,
sounds, and memories. To make the point that it is the brain that sees and
hears and then interprets the information it receives, the instructor will
often show a video of a famous video experiment[1] wherein a student is given
a pair of glasses fitted with a prism in front of each eye, functionally
inverting the image that is sent to the brain. Through the inverting prism
glasses the world looks upside down. At first the student has difficulty
knowing up and down, but then she successfully pours milk into a tea cup. After
a day, the student walks about quite a bit more easily but still at times
reaches up for something that is low down. However, by the third day she is
riding a bicycle and functioning normally.
The
experimenter at that point has the student remove the inverting glasses and she
almost freaks out because, without the glasses on, her brain is now seeing
everything upside down! Yet, in only a matter of a few minutes the brain
readjusts the image and she can see normally once again. To the astonished
participant’s mind, the message is clear: The brain did all of that changing
and adapting. The brain knows what is up and down and what gravity and heat
cause things to do (water pours down and flames rise up). So, it eventually
reorients the information it is getting to fit what normal should be—what it
knows to be true.
For those
of you who believe, here is another example of the power of the brain. If you
wear glasses or lenses, you know that the two eyes are often not equal in their
visual strength. What normally happens is the fuzzier image of the one eye will
be matched into the clear image of the other eye to provide a clear, binocular
(3D) image. Often contact lens wearers who need bifocal lenses will be given
one lens corrected for reading close images and another for seeing at distance.
Anyone who has done this can tell you that the three-dimensional, binocular
image they see is clear, and that they do not notice the fuzzy image as part of
the picture. The brain does all the work by creating clear perception out of
two different images. This is how powerful the brain is.
So, what
does that mean for the purpose of our discussion? Simply this: Seeing is not
“out there” as some objective reality. Two of us can stand on the same street
corner and witness an accident. We can touch the same bent fenders and still,
as long as we do not discuss it, we will file different accident reports. Your
mind makes sense out of the things you perceive and that sense-making process
is inside your brain. That means what you see and what you perceive as a
reality may not in fact be what I see because our brains are loaded with
different events, education, socialization, and vocabularies. And it is
that stuff inside the brain that makes sense out of the data that comes in
through our eyes and ears. Let’s dig into this a bit more.
In
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, he talks about “thin slicing.” Thin
slicing is noticing that we have an initial judgment in the first split second
of each encounter, judgments that are based on our biases which we call our
unconscious biases. The issue is that we come to trust our unconscious biases
as the truth in our perceptions. Gladwell has a particularly informative
exercise which we suggest you try right now.
Write
down five or six words you associate with dark (perhaps dark colors or things
like nighttime, alleyways, and shadows.). Then write down five or six words you
associate with light (sunshine, colors, or windows). Duplicate the list so that
you have two lists of the dark words and two lists of the light words. Then
time yourself on the following:
Beside
each of the dark words in the first list, write a G for good or a B for
bad. Do the same thing for the light list – G for good and B for
bad. Note the time it took. Go back to the second two lists and place a G
beside all of the dark words and then a B beside all of the light words.
When Gladwell timed people on this process it typically took twice as long to
do the second part of the exercise, demonstrating that as powerful as our
logical minds are, we still are operating with biases that affect our
processing and our understanding of the world of events around us.
What you
see and hear is filtered and interpreted inside your brain. But,
wait, there’s more!
You never
get the full story anyway
It is one
thing to note that the information we perceive is filtered, altered, and
made sense of by our brains, and another to note that when that information is
communicated by another person, we will not likely get the full picture. What
others tell us about what happened has already been filtered once by their
brains, as they perceived it. Then that message gets altered again as they
attempt to find the “right” words to describe what they saw, heard, or
experienced. This is even further reduced when we live in a social structure
where the hard and less appealing information is not spoken (like in some
families and in many work environments). We simply don’t like giving what we
think is bad news or negative feedback.
Many
leaders don’t receive the full story, partly because those informing them want
to tell only about the successes in an effort to look good or fear their boss
won’t want to hear the negative information or learn that something is not
working. In one company we know of, scientists were working on a new drug that
seemed on the surface to have great potential. The researchers discovered
however that part of the compound that goes to the brain is not eliminated. It
builds up and has the potential to become toxic—a fact that the senior
leadership did not want to hear. As a result, the compound got all the way to
clinical trials in humans before the FDA shut it down. The company lost
millions and was eventually bought by a competitor.
Take a
good look around you. Are you surrounded by a family that doesn’t like
disruption or negativity? Did you grow up in a family that would avoid conflict
in the name of family harmony? What about your friends? Do you have the type of
good friend that will tell you when you have a piece of broccoli stuck in your
teeth or you have bad breath or your zipper is open? Or do you have really “nice”
friends who tell you you’re great and they have your back? We have the kind of
relationship where we actually look forward to soliciting feedback on each
other’s experience of what we do. We have the depth of a relationship that is
based on love and mutual respect. For example, when one of us says to the other person that our
experience was of them waiting to say the next thought while the first was
speaking (as opposed to listening), that feedback is designed to build the
depth and quality of our relationship so that it gets stronger.
Friends
will be friends and coworkers and employees are well intentioned. You just will
be getting filtered information—either because of their selective mindset or
because of the filtering their mind does when choosing the words to say. Both
the input filtering and the output filtering are what we call context.
Contextualizing information is filtering it through the sense-making process,
either when receiving input or when selecting our words as output.
But not
seeing or hearing the full story goes a lot further than just the feedback you
do or don’t get from your friends and associates. What you see in the world is
only a thin slice of reality as it fully exists. You can’t know everything for
two reasons. One is that you have only two eyes and two ears and one brain and
are therefore only one seven-billionth of the human experience, which we would
have to conclude is quite tiny! But, two, the nature of the universe is chaotic
and unpredictable. As much as our minds would like to create some semblance of
order out of that chaos, it has very little capacity to overrule chaos itself.
One
example of not knowing or being able to control chaos comes from my honeymoon.
Andrew and I were taking a trek in Nepal not long after the great earthquake in
2015. Our guide was Kumar, a man who lived west of Kathmandu and in the
epicenter of the quake. Kumar’s entire village had been destroyed. But Kumar
was a man of his word, and he had contracted with us as a guide, so he took us
up-country for our adventure. Kumar told me that the government had given each
family a sheet of metal which they had folded to make a makeshift metal teepee
for temporary protection. He smiled as he said it was all right, except when it
rained, because then the snakes would also seek shelter under the metal roof.
While we
were out, Kumar got word that the Nepalese government had decided to give each
family six hundred dollars with which to rebuild their houses (believe it or
not, that was enough to build a small house in Nepal at the time). All of the
men of the village were taking a bus to Kathmandu to get their money, but Kumar
could not because our location was nowhere near the village. On the way to
Kathmandu the bus swerved off the narrow mountain dirt road and all the men of
the village—except Kumar—were tragically killed. When Kumar returned to the
village, he was the only adult male. What really impressed Andrew and me was
how he simply stepped in to help all the other families rebuild. He had not
considered himself unfortunate that he could not go with the other men, nor
fortunate that he was not killed in the accident. He just accepted that life
was unpredictable like that.
Deconstructing
your beliefs
When we
are confronted with this evidence that what we see is filtered and tainted by
our belief system, we suddenly are faced with the task of trying to deconstruct
our beliefs. Where do they come from and how do we unearth them? We suggest
starting from a place of acceptance: That the very best we get will be to
realize that no matter how much we work on deconstructing our belief system, we
will always have one. We refer to this as your default context, a topic we will
explain later in the book. But for now, let’s address having a context that is
made up of our collected lessons, education, life experiences, socialization,
and heritage. These lessons are the pool in which we swim as children and
eventually become the ocean in which we swim as adults. We are steeped in it so
completely that we are often not even aware that it exists.
Having a
lived experience simply means that our mental memories are shaped by what we
have learned when things happen (when we experience them). Our lived experience
is not right or wrong, per se, but we get to decide as adults whether those
interpretations serve us. As children, things just seem to happen to us and
with help from our parents, teachers and friends, we “put them into context.”
Perhaps a fire truck blew past you as a little child and the siren frightened
you. Parents calm you down and tell you about first responders and heroes and
one of those bricks was put in place. You were told not to stand outside or go
swimming during a thunderstorm, and another was put in place. These are easily
seen.
But what
is far less visible is how we form beliefs about who we are, what our ethnicity
means, what it means to be male or female. Our parents didn’t tell us what to
think if that information does not line up with what our actual experience is,
if it is not one of those binary choices that our parents were afforded.
Somewhere we learn to identify our tribe or group and identify who is not in
our tribe.
Depending
on where you grew up, you may have been taught that those who look different,
or whose religion is not your tribe’s, are to be feared or held as suspect. You
may have learned that your future is yours for the taking, that you are
entitled to “get ahead” and become “someone,” even president, if you so desire.
But you may have grown up in a pool that told you repeatedly that you were
nothing and would amount to nothing. You may have been taught either explicitly
or surreptitiously that your skin color, gender, or sexual orientation makes
you a target.
All of
these—literally everything that you think or from which you react—has been
learned. And faced with the prospect that some or most of those learned beliefs
no longer serve you and the values that you are living, we get to figure out
how to deconstruct them. This may not be easy, both because it is so
difficult to separate out what is the source of our behaviors, and because they
are so deeply ingrained in our mind.
Systemic racism
Allow us
to take this on by addressing a very large elephant in the room: systemic racism
in our world and in the United States. America was founded on a precept of
religious freedom and human equality—at least those were the spoken words. But
in truth, our nation was founded during a time when slavery was a widely held
belief, often substantiated by the misinterpretation and misuse of Biblical
passages (also written in times when slavery was popular). Slaves were
considered as not human or subhuman and as a result when our founders penned
the line “all men [sic] are created equal” that did not include the rights of
slaves (or women for that matter). Woven into the fabric of our society as a
new world was the age-old principle that certain people, specifically in this
country, those of darker skin color, were not entitled to the type of respect
that was afforded the White ruling class. It was not written in our founding
documents; it was not articulated in our churches; it simply was the
understanding that was implicit in everything we did.
Our
society has matured over the last 250 years and we would like to believe that
as a more mature society, those racist views no longer exist. But it is
terrifically clear, even as we are writing these words, that the unspoken
beliefs of racial inequality are still operating quite powerfully and, in fact,
have become built into our systems of government, law enforcement and “justice.”
Skin color is seen as a symbol of criminal propensity. African-American men are
incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites, and African-American
women at double the rate of white women, according to the NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People). But those figures do not
include Hispanics and other nonwhite groups. Research shows that a nonwhite
“sounding” name on a resume is less likely to be selected by recruiters and HR
professionals than one with a more traditionally white sounding name—despite
having identical resumes. And, conversely, changing the name to “whiten” its
sound more than doubled the likelihood of being called in for an interview.[2]
During
the writing of this chapter, in the first week of June 2020, our nation
watched, with horror, a viral recording of a police officer holding George
Floyd on the ground by pressing his knee on George’s neck, while bystanders
pleaded with him and the other officers to stop. George was lying on the ground
face down with his hands tied behind his back. He was not resisting nor
fighting and repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe,” until he lost consciousness
and died. While the gravity of this explicit killing swept through the country,
it was not an isolated event. We have read so many examples of how deeply
flawed our law enforcement system is that we have almost become immune to their
occurrence, until one so clear and evident catches our attention.
We bring
this up not in an attempt to sensationalize the event but to take on the
difficulty of dismantling deeply rooted misbeliefs. Irrespective of where you
stand on the issues of racism and irrespective of the color of your skin, we
all must face the fact that systemic racism exists and shapes our country’s
behavior. So rather than just taking on the hypothetical belief that you or I
might hold, we will use the clear reality of a systemic injustice based on
racial beliefs as our example. How we do it is the issue here.
The first
step in changing a belief is to recognize that it exists and is having an
adverse effect in our lives. Whatever your position in life, we all own the
responsibility of learning what is happening and the length and breadth of its
current effect. We must recognize it and name it in no uncertain terms. It is
called racism. It does no service for us (nor for anyone, actually) to claim
that we are not racist when we live in a racist society. If we are not
recognizing the impact it is having on a daily basis, we are in denial of its
reality and have no ability to deconstruct it. And by the way if you, the
reader, are Black, Indigenous, brown or even a white-passing person of color,
you already know this truth and have seen more examples that you would ever
care to.
Secondly, we are to find where it is impacting our lives
most. How is racism (in this case) impacting the functioning of the society?
How is racism affecting you? What are you not able to understand and learn
because the books you read, the classes you took in high school and college
were written from a skewed perspective? Do you want to know the truth? Does it
cause you pain that you have been sold a package of lies about our history, about
our legal system, about your neighbors, and about the atrocities committed
against the people native to this country? Take inventory of the real costs of
racism on your life—and please fight the urge to say “none.” One way many of us
have done this is by reading and journaling along with the book Me and White
Supremacy,[3] which we
highly recommend.
The third
step in deconstructing our beliefs is to identify what the replacement belief
is for you. Throughout this book we
will be talking about your vision and your values. “Visions and values are responsibility, integrity, authenticity,” says
our friend and trainer, Michael Strasner in his book Mastering Leadership.
No doubt your vision is one that includes such ideals as peace, harmony,
love and acceptance—the exact opposites of what we see when witnessing a
murder such as George Floyd’s. What this step equates to is changing the
headlines we read in the news. It means changing the concept of a White woman
calling 911 on a Black man in Central Park in New York City and falsely
reporting that he was threatening her (an actual event the same week as the
George Floyd murder). That might read as
“woman accepting a Black man for reminding her to keep her dog on a
leash”—or loving him and expressing gratitude. If that sounds
silly, then start inspecting your own beliefs more deeply. What are the
headlines you have and how might you change the story they feed your mind?
Which
brings us to the fourth step in deconstructing our beliefs: dialogue. When we
were children, we went through a phase (at about eighteen months) where we were
fearful of new and strange people called stranger anxiety. But we should have
outgrown that many years ago. If we are still uncomfortable with the presence
of things and people we don’t understand, it is time to begin learning more
about them. Ask questions and learn about who those “other” people are. Why do
they do what they do? Who are they as individuals? Or just shut up and listen!
Understanding is the key to dismantling beliefs that skew our actions, whether
our reaction is one of racism or fear of the unknown. What builds a system is
the wholesale acceptance of conditions or beliefs without questioning them. It
is only through the hard work of dialogue and outreach that we can begin to
dismantle a system of mistaken and misinformed beliefs.
The fifth
step is to begin changing the actions (ours and those of others around us) each
time we catch it happening. When people are uncomfortable and project their
discomfort on to others because of the perception they have of that other
person, that action is racist (though we could say sexist or classist,
xenophobic, or homophobic as well). When we change the action, we alter the interpretation
and story about the situation and begin to alter the system. But the very
thought of calling an emergency number (911) because you are uncomfortable with
a situation in itself is a ludicrous action and furthers the amplification of
the racist discomfort. It sets in action a response of sending armed personnel
to resolve a situation that might easily be resolved by other means and other
social services.
All five
of these steps form a foundation for committed action. We each must work to
alter the existing narrative that permits covert and systemic racism to exist.
This final step in deconstructing our beliefs is to take repeated actions
consistent with the values we espouse as part of our vision. When we
continually act in this new way, we habituate the desired belief of equality,
humanity, compassion, acceptance, or whatever we hope to be living as our
values.
Deconstructing Your Beliefs
Try the
following exercise to apply these steps for deconstructing your beliefs:
- Notice
where you are not seeing the whole picture when someone points out that
there might be another way of seeing things. Write down two or three
beliefs that might be operating instead. Give that belief a name (for
example: “Money doesn’t grow on trees”). Call it out as a whole system of
related beliefs (for example around finances or career potentials or
marital relationships).
- Expand
your list by noticing where else this (these) belief(s) has (have) an
impact on your life. In what other arenas might you be impacted by this
set of beliefs?
- For
each belief or sub-belief, write out an alternative that counters the
logic or thought in the belief. For example, you may have a set of beliefs
about financial scarcity (as in, you don’t have a lot of money and don’t
see a way to make more). One subset belief might be “Money doesn’t grow on
trees!” That being the case, your replacement might be “Money is flowing
everywhere.”
- Start
by listening to others and the beliefs that they hold. Listen to people
that are good with money and know how to manage it well. Ask what they do
and how you could apply it in your life. But the key is to really listen.
Don’t listen to see where they are wrong (your belief will want you to do
that). Listen with what the masters call “Beginner’s mind.”
- Identify
the action that you will take that is consistent with the new belief. If
your new belief is “Money is flowing everywhere,” then perhaps you need to
be part of the flow by giving a gift of money to someone more needy than
you are. How much will you give and how often will you give it?
- Do
it! Practice it and live it as your reality. Until you have done it enough
times to produce a mental “muscle memory,” you have the possibility of
slipping back to the old belief. Keep practicing.
“To truly communicate your vision masterfully, you must bring
your intention alive in the listener. You must bring it alive in such a way
that the listener is so connected and empowered by the vision, the message, or
the possibilities you’re communicating, that they take hold of it as if it is
their own.” (Strasner, Mastering Leadership, 2018).
[1]
“Inverted Vision Experiment Clip,” R.C. Hartman, YouTube, July 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHMvEMy7B9k.
[2]
Dina Gerdeman, “Minorities Who ‘Whiten’ Resumes Get More Interviews,” Harvard
Business School, May 17, 2017, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews.
[3]
Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become
a Good Ancestor (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020).
For more posts about the authors and this book, click HERE.
For more book excerpts, click HERE.
For posts about perception, click HERE.
For more posts about racism, click HERE.
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