Perception – we only see or hear what fits our reality

Our perception screws with us. WYSIATI (What You See Isn’t All There Is), an acronym from Dick Swaab’s brilliant book We Are Our Brains, but never a more true set of words, at least in my humble opinion.

How many times has our perception let us down, fooled us, led us to believe one thing only to discover another? Granted – sometimes what you see is all there is, but, then ironically, you say to yourself, ‘did I just see that?’ or ‘did I just hear right?’ Then you tend not to believe it in any case because all your experience or preconceived ideas tells you it’s not possible in any case.

You see a young man running across a field in a pair of shorts and t-shirt. He’s out running, staying fit. Or maybe he was out for a walk, got a text message to say his child has fallen ill and is being rushed to hospital and he’s running back to his office from his lunch hour break to get into his car to head to the hospital. Or perhaps, he’s just stolen the latest gear from a sports shop and is making a quick get away? Or perhaps, he’s part of the team that works at the shop and is chasing the thief whom you didn’t notice running because you had been checking a text on your phone about your child who has just fallen ill at school but is ok, she’s at home resting with your wife. And then you think, I don’t have a wife!

Ok, I digress, but I think you get my point. Perceptions lands us in trouble. It has us passing judgement, drawing conclusions, making assumptions, taking unnecessary risks, and rushing decisions among other things.

We see certain things and because we cannot accept that our eyes can and do deceive us, that our mind does play tricks on us, that our ears mishear things, or because we are relatively sane and intelligent beings, and that we can interpret clear, concise messages without misunderstanding, we find it hard to believe that we make mistakes.

Mistakes start with other people; whilst we are in control of our senses and we are consistent and based on what we have seen, or what our previous experience tells us, or we’ve considered information presented to us, or we’ve consulted the informed opinion of others, we of course must be right.

We are right because we have thought it through. We are logical, rational creatures (or at least we think we are). We are not subject to prejudice, bias, making assumptions or external influences, and because our ‘gut instinct’ is normally correct (even though we never document the instances of when it was right or wrong in order to compare success rate), we can reasonably ascertain that our synopsis of a given situation is correct.

And we are of course good at convincing ourselves we are right, because we remind ourselves we are right more times than not because hindsight reminds us and because there was that time we told Tom that John and Mary’s marriage wouldn’t last and therefore we are very perceptive.

In any case, even if we are wrong we have to rationalise it and put it down to something because the shame, oh the shame, not to mention the embarrassment, humiliation, and not forgetting the utter stupidity and what that feels like when we’ve discovered we’re wrong. And if anyone flags it up, we’ll just put it down to someone misinterpreting my words or taking things I said out of context. That sort of thing happens all the time.

Generally speaking, very few of us fully understand how perception works, and even less take or make time to find out. We are blissfully unaware how much our respective culture influences us, not only at a national level, but regionally and locally, even the street we live in. If everyone in your street is kind and considerate parkers of their car, you become used to it and so when those at work are the opposite, they are all a bunch of feckers without you ever exploring why it is the way it is but because you see it with your own eyes then it must be true.

What we see we tend to perceive as the truth without really stopping to consider if that indeed is the case – rather than asking is all that we see all there really is. We fail to understand how our experience, beliefs, knowledge, values and so on influence our perception to such an extent that our starting point is that the other person must be wrong.

We view the present through the prism of the past, and as we don’t like to appear incoherent, inconsistent or wrong we are strongly inclined not to change even if we know we are wrong or have doubts, particularly if there is a risk of losing face involved.

Perception really does screw with us. We need to know how and why and then get ourselves a new pair of glass, metaphorically speaking. By the way, that young man was chasing after a ball that his friend had punted down the field - you were so busy messaging your future wife on messenger you hadn’t even noticed that you had sat down at a football pitch mistaking it for the park near your home (pre-lockdown of course)!