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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Exercises in making sense

Posted in creativity, from the living room, life, narrative, perception on October 14, 2009| 3 Comments »

Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related.

The first skill is pattern spotting.

What do we think when we look up and see this?

oak

We pick out the colours, the shapes and the contexts of what we see, and we name it – sunlight behind oak leaves, casting overlapping shadows.

This happens so quickly and effortlessly that we don’t even pause to wonder about it. In fact, we’re seeing patterns everywhere, all the time. It’s a fundamental skill needed for understanding.

The other skill we use is storytelling, or narrative. We “join the dots”, or “put things together” by creating narratives. By creating stories we make sense of the patterns we see. Personal sense. When you look at this oak tree for example, you’ll perhaps become aware of certain feelings, and maybe those feelings related to previous experiences involving oak trees. As a species we create stories about trees, and, specifically, about oak trees, so maybe some of those stories will come to mind and your experience of looking at this tree will be enriched by that.

Well, here’s an interesting study which explores how we might enhance these core skills. The first sentence of the report caught my attention –

Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter.

Pardon?

Well, according to the psychologists who conducted this study –

exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions

It appears that reading a text, or watching a movie which is challenging to understand because it doesn’t appear to make sense, enhances our skills in making sense! I suppose it’s a bit like going to the gym (I wouldn’t know….never been!) and practising using your muscles so that they then work more efficiently and with greater strength.

Well, the questions which arise about what do they mean by “smarter” are answered by the specifics of the study. What they actually showed was that after reading Kafka, or watching a David Lynch movie, a person’s ability to spot patterns was enhanced.

Interesting. Actually, I spend most of every day trying to spot patterns, listening to stories, and trying to make sense of what I’m seeing and hearing. You could say that’s my job. But how interesting, even from the perspective of training doctors. Maybe we should be encouraging doctors and medical students to encounter surrealism, to read Kafka and watch David Lynch. Maybe that would help them to become more skilled doctors. The practice of medicine isn’t all about learning facts after all.

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Patterns

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, music, perception, photography on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part of the way I work, but sometimes it just becomes a more conscious issue. Last week I had to conduct a training session for a junior doctor about consultation technique and one of the things I mentioned was how doctors are trained to spot patterns. We do that to make a diagnosis for example (“Oh, I know what this is. This is a thyroid problem”) In parallel with this I’m reading the novel “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (and thoroughly enjoying it by the way!), and the part I’m reading just now is about the links between code-breaking, mathematics and music – the link being patterns and the ability to spot patterns. While I was driving at the weekend I caught the end of a discussion in a programme on Radio 4 about musical scales, and Pythagoras’ view of harmony. Didn’t hear enough of it to understand what it was about, but then, last night the chapter I read in the novel explained exactly the role of Pythagoras in the connection between music and mathematics (subject of another post I feel!). How strange, isn’t it?

Here’s a photo I took recently. What I noticed here was the pattern of the flowers. I thought it looked like a constellation of stars in the sky.

flower constellation

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to see ourselves as others see us

Posted in from the reading room, health, life, perception, psychology on July 27, 2009| 1 Comment »

That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March 2002 369-381 and the 30 MAY 2008 VOL 320 of SCIENCE Magazine)

Do you ever think why am I only person to see something rationally and reasonably, and everyone else seems biased?
Well, that’s a common experience. It’s also common to wonder why nobody really understands you, and to always fail to completely understand another person.
Why is that?
The practice of medicine is based on understanding……trying to understand what another person is experiencing in order to try and identify whether or not they are ill, and what kind of help they might need. Sounds simple, but it’s far from it.
I recently read two related articles which explain these difficulties very clearly. As with most insights, what they have to say seems clear and obvious once you read it. Both articles deal with the differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others.
In essence they show that for self-knowledge we have continuous access to our inner subjective experience of reality, including the full range of sensory inputs, our emotions, and our thought processes. However, when we try to have knowledge of another person we have no direct access at all to any of these phenomena. How exactly does another person perceive and experience a particular colour, or sound, or smell? What emotional experience are they having? And what are they actually thinking? We don’t know. We can’t know. We have to listen to what they have to say and watch how they behave then make our assumptions. Our assumptions, of course, are based on our perspective, not on theirs.
So it isn’t possible to know another person the way can know ourselves. On top of that, our subjective experience conveys a degree of authenticity to our sense of self, which can never be matched when interpreting the language or behaviour of another.
It’s just how things are. We function in a way which gives great weight to our subjective experience…..even our opinions and assumptions about others gain, for us, this high degree of authenticity. We have a tendency to think we can understand another person better than they can understand themselves. The reality, however, is just the reverse, and we should always doubt our understanding and judgement of others more than we do. That’s why true empathy requires a high level of humility.

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Bird warnings and bird life indicators of world health

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, science on July 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »

You’ll be familiar with the idea the “canary down the mine” where a canary in a cage was carried down into the mine by the miners to give them early warning that the air conditions were deteriorating. Well, I just read an interesting variation on that tale in a French magazine called “Nouvelles cles”. The article was about Christophe Perret-Gentil, a biologist who became a herboriste. It began by telling an amazing story of a group walking in the woods in the Luberon very early one morning. They were learning how to recognise the different birds from their songs and to measure the quality of the environment through those sounds, when suddenly all the birds went quiet. Their expert leader, Christophe Perret-Gentil, commented that it was totally unprecedented for this to happen and stated that something serious, some “great event” must have occured somewhere on the planet. The following day, the group were amazed to read about the terrible earthquake in China which had killed many thousands. It had occured at precisely the time the birds fell silent.

Now I don’t know what to make of a story like that. It does remind me of the tales of the animals reacting to the approach of the tsunami before people became aware of it. Fascinating.

However, what actually interested me more was why this man was out counting bird songs in the first place. When he became a “herboriste” he thought about how to identify the plants which were of the highest quality and he knew that it couldn’t be done by measuring levels of anything in a lab. He thought about the indicators of a healthy environment and came up with an idea about birds. It’s quite a simple idea but he’s elaborated it into a detailed scoring system.

He goes to an area where a producer is growing plants which he might want to buy and from early in the morning he notes the range and variety of bird species living there. He has a whole classification system developed, with various levels of significance, from the common, indigent birds, through to the presence of endangered species. The more rare, or more endangered species scoring higher. This gives him an overall assessment of the health of the local ecology. He says it is difficult to actually see a lot of birds, but that it was easy to learn their songs so he charts the health of the environment by identifying the population of birds present as he hears them sing.

There’s something beautifully poetic about this method, and something entirely rational too. At a scientific level it draws together biology, ecology, ornithology, and botany, and at a human level it draws together music, observation, that brilliant human capacity to spot patterns and relate them to each other. Christophe then takes these threads and weaves them into a story which gives him a knowledge about quality, not mere quantity.

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Living stone

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, photography, tagged on May 21, 2009| 2 Comments »

It strikes me that in Japanese culture there is a great and sensitive understanding of the life, or the spirit, of stone. I was struck by that as I wandered through a couple of Japanese gardens recently. You just don’t see rocks like these in UK gardens, and there’s something about them which makes you SEE them when you might never have been used to seeing rocks before. Take a look at these examples and see if they change the way you notice stone over the next few days.

stone in the garden

stone in the garden

stone in the garden

stone in the garden

stone in the garden

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little BIG inspirations

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography, tagged , on April 23, 2009| 2 Comments »

delicate plant ghosts

This tiny little plant is only about the size of my little finger. It’s so small, it would’ve been easy to miss it, but I’m glad I didn’t.

It inspires me for so many reasons.

I love the fact that what catches the attention is the spaces. They’re the first thing you notice. Almost as if when looking at a net you’d see the holes first, then the thread. And what was in those spaces? Some kind of seed I expect. This framework was most likely the structure that held the seeds in place, raised them up to the sky and waited till the wind blew and took them away to settle somewhere else. That got me thinking about seeds, and how many amazing ways plants have to spread their seeds around the world, how they’ll use the wind, insects, birds, really pretty much any way they can to hitch lifts, travel far and wide without any power to move in the seed itself. This set me thinking about the interconnectedness of everything, of how the world is a vast interconnected network, how really you can’t understand anything or anybody without knowing something of the world they live in and some of their vast web of connections, influences, links and bonds.

Then I got to thinking about how this little group of circles held up the past for inspection. Look, said the plant, here is where my sons and daughters were, and now they’ve all flown and I’ve only the spaces now in my life, where they used to be. And that’s just how it should be.

I had other thoughts too, but I’d be interested to hear if this little plant inspires any thoughts of your own!

delicate plant ghosts

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What do you see?

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on April 21, 2009| 4 Comments »

tree monster

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It’s not about you

Posted in life, perception, personal growth on August 31, 2008| 3 Comments »

This is rule number three in Daniel Pink’s “Johnny Bunko” book which I mentioned a wee while back. There are two reasons why both the Johnny Bunko rules and this particular rule came to my mind this week.

Firstly, I’ve just been finding that in recent times this little phrase has often popped into my mind. “It’s not about you”. The value of this phrase is its power to re-orientate you. It’s only natural that our inner subjective experience is dominant. So when we feel certain strong emotions – anger, frustration, sadness, and, yes, even happiness – our default understanding of what is going on tends to emerge from the emotions themselves. It’s only a short (unconscious) step from there to “Why is he (or she) treating me this way?” or “Why is he (or she) upsetting me?” or some such similar question. The assumption is that the other person is behaving the way they are with the intention of having an effect on us. Not just an intention, but, a primary intention. We find ourselves thinking that the person is behaving this way because they want us to have a certain emotion. In other words, if it wasn’t for me, he (or she) wouldn’t be behaving this way. Well, you know, maybe in some instances, it’s true. But in many more instances it isn’t! Whether it’s true or not, however, this train of thought gives away our personal power to the other person. We give them the ability and the will to effect the emotions that we are experiencing. An easy, and a quick, way to undermine this whole reaction is to say to yourself “It’s not about you”. Just considering this as a possibility can be liberating. It allows you to shift your conscious focus from yourself to others. At best, it opens the doors to the possibility of a more empathic and more understanding interpretation of the other person’s behaviour.

“It’s not about you” also came into my mind recently when considering the advice a French philosopher, Hadot, who writes in his book “N’oubliez pas de Vivre”, about the almost spiritual exercise of taking a view from on high. When you climb a mountain and survey the world from the mountain’s heights you have an intense shift of perspective. Take this a little further and consider the viewpoint of one of the astronauts looking back at the Earth from the Moon. (Whenever I think that thought, I can hear Nanci Griffiths singing “From a Distance” inside my head!) Whether you physically climb or fly high above your daily world, or whether you take a journey in your mind using your imagination, this experience of looking down on life from on high also has the potential to give you an “It’s not about you” moment. You can become aware of your smallness and of the brevity of your own life in the grand scheme of things.

There’s another sense too in this “It’s not about you” perspective. Time and time again I hear patients tell stories of great suffering which shrinks or even, at least temporarily, disappears, when they connect to others, when they feel, express and act their love for others and in doing so feel a surge of love and meaning in their own lives. Managing to focus on others is not easy when your suffering is so great that it is overwhelming all aspects of your life, but those who manage it, even for short periods, often report feeling transformed.

There was a second reason why Johnny Bunko came to mind this week and that was the post by Daniel Pink on the Johnny Bunko blog where he related Barack Obama‘s Presidency bid to the six Bunko lessons. Go read it for yourself. It’s a good introduction to Johnny Bunko!

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From different perspectives the view can look very different

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on July 27, 2008| 2 Comments »

clifftop clouds

This photo of a cliff with the clouds swirling around it looks distant and remote. You could imagine it’s a landscape in a wild, barely populated area.

However………

When I pull back the zoom without shifting my feet a single inch I can capture this photo……

cassis beach

Different impression entirely, huh?

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Art and Life

Posted in from the dark room, perception, philosophy, photography on July 10, 2008| 1 Comment »

art and life

Art imitating life. You’ve heard that before. Well, this photo doesn’t exactly show the same scene in the painting as I was witnessing across the other side of the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, but it strikes me as close enough to make me wonder…….

How do we see the world? Is it like painting? Do we construct an image of reality in our brains? And if we do, how “real” is that image? In many ways, the brain works a lot more like a painter creating a representation of what he or she sees, than it does like a camera, converting the light rays into a fixed image on film or disc. I like that. I like that the way we perceive the world involves creativity. Day by day, minute by minute, we create the reality we perceive.

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