WHY DO WE THINK THE WAY WE THINK?

In this post I am going to talk about the nature of our perception, and particularly the things that we think are true and those that we think are not. 

In much of my work with families and couples, business owners and their employees, there is one theme that stands always in the way of their 'healing' processes: the way each one of them perceives reality to be. 

Conflicts are ridden with a sense that I know the truth and he or she doesn't. Likewise, no one is ever in conflict with anyone when they share the same view of reality. So what creates these divides even when we try our best not to cause them or have them in our lives?

The short answer to this complex question is: the assumptions that filter our sensorial experiences. The cognitive, thinking machinery that interprets how your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, skin and internal organs sense the world. These assumptions, are rooted in specific limitations of our senses, as well as social conditioning and individual differences. 

For instance, recent research shows that there are several differences in the way women, in general, process odors and colors. Sadie Steffens, reporting on the work of Israel Abramov, of CUNY’s Brooklyn College, writes:

Abramov asked men and women to break down the hue of a color and to assign a percentage to the categories red, yellow, green, and blue. The results showed that women were more adept at distinguishing between subtle gradations than were men. This sensitivity was most evident in the middle of the color spectrum. With hues that were mainly yellow or green, women were able to distinguish tiny differences between colors that looked identical to men. In fact, Abramov found that slightly longer wavelengths of light were required for men to see the same hues as women – hues identified as orange by women were seen as more yellow by men. However, when shown light and dark bars flickering on a screen, men were better than women at seeing the bars. Men were better able to perceive changes in brightness across space, a skill useful for reading a letter on an eye chart or recognizing a face. This effect was increased as the bars narrowed, suggesting that men are more sensitive to fine details and rapid movement than women.

Abramov thinks that testosterone, the hormone responsible for differentiating the sex of embryos (all embryos are initially female), and for growing hair on our bodies, affects also the visual regions of the brain. Yet men and women aren't the only categories who see color differently from each other. So do older people, compared to younger people. And people who work with color — think of artists and designers — have a significantly more enhanced color vocabulary, meaning that the difference here might not be biological, but cultural.  

The point here is that there is a very large number of factors that determine how we sense the world inside and around us, and even more processes that condition how we make sense of these inputs. So it is natural to walk around thinking that 'I know reality', because by the time you have a sense of that reality, so much has been going on. 

So with all these differences in the mix of things, how do we find a common ground? 

The first step towards a more coordinated sense of reality and 'truth' is to acknowledge that the gap that exists between us are not things we are or have willingly determined, but rather are the product of many complex, and for the most part, unconscious processes which we can only, slowly, begin to appreciate when we accept and acknowledge that they are there to begin with. In other words, the first step towards a more coordinated sense of reality, is to relieve yourself and others of the sense of responsibility you have for knowing what is true. Admitting to yourself "I barely know how I perceive the world, let alone how I derive a sense of truth from it", should naturally allow for the recognition that others might be in the same boat as you, and that therefore, the differences in views of what is true and what is not true, reside more in these unconscious processes than they reside in "what one decides to be true".

Once this recognition has been made, it's now time to play around with naming our perceptions to playfully derive the assumptions that influence our sense of truth. 

For instance in the New Age Crap Winners game I created for couples and families to encourage them understanding how they think philosophically about life, I ask the players to divide the Yogi tea tags I collect every time I drink a tea, into what they think is new age crap advice and what, perhaps, might indeed be wise wordings to keep in mind. It might sound very simple, but the reality of it, is that making this sort of decisions implies engaging with our values. These too, are, for the most part, unconscious, but unlike many biologically rooted differences, they are largely culturally determined, or at worse, related to our personal temperaments. At any rate, striking a difference between fluffy pon-pon beliefs and wise principles is better accompanied by a discussion about what we find silly or unrealistic, too general and applicable to everything and anything, or, on the other hand, rather insightful, deep, and fundamental to how we live. Better still, such discussion may surround real or imaginary examples of how we think a particular statement is fluffy and nonsensical, or deep and fundamental. 

Explaining ourselves in the process of making these decisions is likely to reveal the kind of assumptions and values we live by unconsciously day in and day out, and by this increase our ability to get along and know why we differ in opinions on subject matters as wide as coffee and politics.    

Look after your Heart,

Your Shrink in Bansko