Am I Seeing This Right?

I wish everyone was as perceptive as you!

Yes I agree!

the trouble with jogging a memory is that one can be accused of manipulating the rememberer. that may be unjust too, but it just means our memories are not absolute. plus, we like pleasing the person doing the asking! we're such hopeful creatures. :)

You make some interesting points, - it's just horrible when a child is not believed (or an adult come to that) simply because their perception and subsequent description doesnt tally with the the other person's interpretation. It can cause lasting damage so needlessly; as you said in that example with you, neither person was wrong, yet you were judged to be - very hurtful and infuriating for you I am sure, since you were unjustly villified. I hate that!



Interesting to think about memory triggering another memory. I hadn't thought about it in that way before, but that is often what happens. That would seem to be recognised by police and the media when they reconstruct crimes hoping to jog peoples' memories in that way.

people seem to believe that if you don't see things as they do -- especially something as clinical as a movie -- that you are daft or worse, that you are lying. i am one of the children always accused of lying, when i was telling the absolute truth, but being so young, i did not have the experience or vocabulary to describe it in terms others expected or understood. for instance, i once told a girl that the kitchen in my apartment had no window, and she said, "that's obviously a lie -- all kitchens have windows" and we argued t his point. then i discovered that this slightly older girl interpreted the word "window" as any hole in the wall through which air moved -- in other words, a ventilation opening, and in our apartment block, all kitchens and bathrooms had either a window or a ventilation access. neither of us was wrong, and neither of us were lying. but it caused a lot of issues in school the following year!



humans also remember things better if they are allowed to remember a few things first. a very public example: this was highlighted during the anita hill testimony during the clarence thomas senatorial hearings -- she remembered things, on top of other memories, but was accused of lying and embellishing, in order to harm thomas. in fact, it seems humans don't remember everything at once, and one memory is a trigger or pathway to another. the poor woman, whatever her faults, was labeled a troublemaker and liar, when she was simply doing her duty.



thank you for YOUR perceptions!

Kyosaku,

What a wonderful post, thank you. Your depth of understanding had so many colours in it for me; That is my perception, physically colours may not be your thing but in this element you more than make up for that 'deficit'. I am so interested in all you say, and you say it so well.



I note that your students have difficulty seeing the second image once they have been shown the first, which goes to show the power of the mindset. With great respect, I don't agree about perceptions and the sun. Prior to telescopes we had one perception, and post telescopes we had another perception to reflect our increased understanding of how earth relates to the sun. This doesn't seem an arguement against perception to me (or maybe I have missed the point).



You mention other animals who are supposedly inferior yet have their own perceptions every bit as interesting as ours. I thought you might like the perception of one of the great apes who was taught to talk, specifically to (deaf) sign and was very fluent. Her perception of spectacles was that they were not spectacles but "eye hats", and that the ring on someone's hand was not a ring but a "finger bracelet" for example. I can't remember her name, you may know of this work?



I am glad you found the witness study as interesting as I did and that it may help your students. Finally, I absolutely loved the quotes, and have Wayne Dwyer's 'Pulling Your Own Strings', I have found him an inspiration. I hope very much we can be friends?

I really enjoyed reading your perceptions of the perception. In my work teaching people who work with troubled children, I use a cowboy/old man ambiguous image, like the old lady/girl you included. I chose it because most of my students are familiar with the ladies. To prepare for this I randomly hand out drawings that clearly represent one of the perceptions of the image, and give time to study the images without sharing. Then I project the ambiguous image.



Once programed, a lot of people have a very hard time seeing the other image. A very small group are actually able to see both images when I tell them that there is another figure, cowboy or old man, there. I have had two students over the years that could not see the other figure even with the specific drawing superimposed on the ambiguous one.



There is another element to this game. I have some one who sees it one way try to describe it, verbally, to someone who sees it the other way, so that they can see it. It almost never works. However, when I ask someone who can clearly see both figures to describe it to someone who can't, they almost always succeed and using similar devices. They are able to describe features that are common to both characters and where features meet. In the old lady/girl example they might say, "the point of the girl's chin, is the end of the old lady's nose."



Through an accident of birth, I learned early in life (about 12), that perception and reality are not necessarily the same thing. I am 35% color blind, typical red/green deficit. When I got into a serious squabble with my brothers at the dinner table, over the color of the gray car dad brought home to fix, mom got me to the eye doctor. It was an epiphany to be sure. I realized that I couldn't see that the car actually was green, just like they argued.



So I learned, perceptions are not always accurate or real; there are instruments, including the perceptions of others that can help extend our perception; And, by extension, that opinions are not facts. A very important lesson for anyone who's work involves making assessments about other people. It is important to remember the biases that color my perceptions, lest i forget that my sense of another person may totally inaccurate...



As you may have figured out by now. I don't agree that perceptions are everything. I believe that great advances have been made by questioning our perceptions. After all, the sun finally stopped orbiting the earth when perception was extended by the telescope. Human perception is singularly limited compared to many of the animals we see as our inferiors.



I really appreciated your description of the witness study. It would work well in my classes on reporting significant incidents. It also supports my own belief that the only way I can acquire a truly capture a complete world view, is by listening to others with the knowledge that their perceptions are as valid as my own. Sometimes it is as small a difference as where we were standing, our viewing point. For me, it is the path towards being able to embrace the diversity of the human experience.



I don't remember where the quote comes from but it is so appropriate here. "We see the world not as ti is, but as we are." Another, along the same lines, “Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”~ Wayne Dyer



Thank you again for posting this. I hope you will find my own comments a suitable addition to the topic.