What We Think We See

Sometimes our lightening quick minds are too fast for our own good

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

From a half a block away, I saw them gesturing back and forth to each other, she posed in front of Stephen King’s house, he with a camera in his hand. Something wasn’t sitting well. As I got closer, I heard raised voices. Was this an angry situation? I couldn’t quite tell. I continued my walk.
 
As I rounded the corner at the Thomas Hill Standpipe (next up on the Stephen King tour after which my walk and the SK tour go their separate ways), lo and behold, there they were again, still going at it. Glancing at the car, I noticed the New York plates. That explains it I said to myself. Loud New Yorkers.*
 
What it didn’t explain, though, was how that long, classy Cadillac went with the tie dye t-shirt the lady was wearing and her husband’s farm wear. In fact, nothing went together once I got within greeting range, and they turned around. I had them pegged as old but they were young!
 
There was more mismatch. Though the lady was wearing a funkified t-shirt, her bangs were turned under in one continuous roll straight from the curling iron. Make of that what you will but it doesn’t go with tie dye. And her husband…as opposed to being an angry loudmouth he was a study in cheerful agreeableness, calling out good morning and complimenting me for all the beautiful houses in Maine and wasn’t it lucky I got to live here? It turns out they were from upstate New York and lived in a town of 500.
 
I walked away totally befuddled at my inability to place them. None of my unconsciously acquired, poorly tested stereotypes squared up.
 
What I was engaging in -- trying to size them up and put them in boxes -- is a form of cognitive distortion where your mind is way out there doing stuff on its own that may have precious little to do with reality. These misconceptions are exactly what Zoe Rodriguez, a photographer and former recovery coach from Acadia Hospital, along with writer Amy Albo, demonstrated in their 2012 TEDX BYU talk about the assumptions we make. In the talk they flash a photograph of a nun on the screen.
 
For the past 35 years Mother Antonia has been living in a cold dark cell in a Tijuana prison ministering to prisoners including some of Mexico’s most hardened criminals. But while it is true she is a nun, it is also true that within her is a wealthy, twice-divorced Beverly Hills socialite and mother of seven. She is more, way more, than what most of us would make room for as we look at her photograph.
 
How the project came together
After going through an alienating period of time in which Zoe could see how the outward appeal of her financially fortunate life was causing people to entirely miss seeing the truth of her real, terribly unhappy existence, she became fascinated with exploring the judgments we spontaneously make about people. A photographer, she envisioned creating a book filled with photos of people who defy what we think we see. She teamed up with her TED Talk co-presenter Amy Albo, writer Peta Owens-Liston and photographer Sasha Polak to create What I thought I saw. A book that challenges the way you look at things because maybe you just don’t know.
 
This gorgeous coffee table-size book is an experience of illumination. The reader is encouraged to take in the image of each person on the page then sit back and watch what their mind is making of it. What do they think they are seeing? After a few minutes they return to the book to discover the real story about the person, not the story they made up. Like Brendan. On the outside he’s an exceptionally clean-cut, fancy high -priced lawyer working in a conservative law firm. Take the fancy suit off and you will see his full-body art, a Chagall painting in tattoo.
 
Or think of all the people for whom we see the glaring disability and miss the ability, like Logan who was born with Miller Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by a number of physical abnormalities. For Logan this took the form of a host of disfigured body parts including very underdeveloped hands, not hands you would expect great art to be made with. But those hands do make great art. In fact, Van Gogh is in his bloodline, nine generations back. 
 
The unexpected delight of being wrong
As much as we may think we know what we’re looking at, finding out we don’t know can bring a crazy amount of unexpected elation. In 2009 when Susan Boyle, a frumpy looking middle-aged woman, took the stage on Britain’s Got Talent she was met with outright disrespect. How could this entirely humble-looking woman have anything special in her? She wasn’t a star.
 
But knowing she inspired this sort of response, Susan had fun with it, swishing her hips and sassily telling the audience there was more to her than what met the eye. This set off massive eye rolling in the audience, downright rude. But then she opened her mouth to sing. Shockwaves brought the house down. People were transported by a voice so majestic there was nothing to do but glory in their wrongness and cheer their fool heads off.
 
There is something so beautiful – akin to relief – in discovering there is way more to a person’s story than what anyone might tell by looking at them. By looking at us. What else was that massive response to the dowdy Susan Boyle about?
 
For all our misguided and often unfair judgments we’re not entirely to be blamed. We’re wired to size things up quickly and hierarchically with a leaning toward our own group. We’re committing unconscious bias, in other words, which we are all subject to and, by definition, are unaware of until we train ourselves to become conscious. But without this skill for categorization we’re toast so we teach it to our children right away and are so delighted and proud when they sort all the orange stars in one pile and the blue rectangles in another; small things in one pile, big things in another.
 
As necessary as our ability to quickly assess a situation is, sometimes our lightening quick minds are too fast for our own good and keep us from seeing dimensions that will never reveal themselves to our first, shallow look. For that intelligence, we must soften our eyes and look again.
 
To seeing clearly and openly,
 
E
 
 
*A note of apology to New Yorkers
I know people from New York – including New York City – who are nothing like the automatic explanation in my head linking loud people and the great state of New York. (But what do you expect? I’m just a hick from Iowa!) It is disconcerting how quickly conditioned notions like that surface in our minds, facilitated by brains built for lightening quick categorization. It just points to how very deliberate we have to be in questioning the origin and validity of our convictions. We can always stand to ask ourselves where did we get that idea and what lived and researched evidence do we have for such a sweeping view of the world?