What if the world you experience is not the world you understand?
What if the world you experience is not the world you remember?
What if “reality” is unstable, ephemeral, situational, momentary, dare I say - a self-delusion?
There was an important experiment regarding memory. A subject was shown a square of 4 rows of 4 random letters (without any meaning, not “words”). The subject was given some time to experience the square and remember it.
Next, the subject was asked to recall the letters as best they can. And indeed, they could recite the letters in order.
However, what’s interesting is the recall wasn’t visual at all. No subjects could recall the letters in a different order, say backward or from bottom to top. None at all. What’s going on here?
We think we “see” the world. And we do. But what we digest and consume from this experiencing is what fits into our established perceptual “code”. What fits, stays. What doesn’t is dross and left out. Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable in recall. Why? Because they only remember what matches their code. All else is a “general” or a vague impression. If the person seen looked just like our mother, or someone very familiar to us, we’d recall their appearance. If not, we’d be wildly inaccurate and perhaps only remember a vivid detail - what didn’t match our code (say if there was a number among the letters in the square).
This has important implications for us, our lives and how we live. We must accept that we are indeed always biased. We must accept the subjective nature of ourselves. We must accept that our “science” is not really pure science at all. We are just seeing the world through our own existing code.
Let me end with an example, to put this all together.
I used to work with a guy called Willy. He was Jamaican, a fun guy to work with. We’d laugh all day with Willy around, as we formed basements or poured concrete. I thought I knew Willy. He was a fun, scruffy guy. Always unkept, kind of dirty, unrefined. That was my code and where he fit. One year, a co-worker got married. We all went to the wedding. And lo and behold Willy! He looked like the Duke Of Windsor. Dressed to the nines. Clean-shaven. Gracious. Elegant. Still to this day, don’t know where the Willy I knew went.
What I find terrible about this short video is how we don’t blame ourselves for not truly seeing the real “Jim”. We blame his non-conformity to our perceptual, cultural code. And until he is transformed into what our code expects, we consider him dirt, unclean, unfortunate.
We see a lot of “other” people, the unfamiliar, through this same inner code. It’s something we can limit through awareness, conscious intervention. But most don’t - we keep putting people into “our” boxes.
Just a thought. What today are you seeing but not really seeing - out there?