What You Think You See

Seeing is Believing.  Is it?  Is what we see always representative of reality?

In my day job, I sometimes stand at a desk where people are expected to scan their membership card as they enter the building. If you forgot your card, we can enter you another way; but everyone must be admitted through the system.  

One morning, I was at the desk when a woman was digging through her bag for her keychain (didn't she just get out of her car with her keys in her hand?) while someone else walked by me on her way to her yoga class.  While the first woman didn't say anything out loud, I could see her facial expression, wondering why she had to dig for her card while this woman walked on by.  What she didn't know was that this woman had, in fact, scanned in a few minutes earlier. She had gone down the stairs and realized she had left her water bottle in the car. Since we both knew she had already scanned, it wasn't necessary for her to do it again.  But without that piece of knowledge, the card searcher had only what she saw to inform her attitude and incorrectly interpreted what she saw using incomplete data.

This is more common in your life than breathing.  I'm not being hyperbolic.  You only breathe about 20 times per minute, but you interpret incoming sensory data hundreds of times per second. Literally everything that happens in your mind is an interpretation made by your brain.  As I used to tell my science students, eyes and ears are data collectors, but seeing and hearing only happen when your brains interpret that data. 

• This is why you can perceive the room spinning when you are dizzy even though that is obviously not the input your eyes are receiving. It comes from the brain trying to put together inconsistent data from two different sources - the still spinning fluid in your ear's semicircular canals and the input from the eyes.  The brain trusts the ear more and tells the brain to see something that the eyes are not seeing.
• This is why people can hallucinate voices that are not actually present. Their brain is making an interpretation of something that is not consistent with reality. Their ears are not actually hearing anything, but their brain is.

Yet, we all put great faith in our own interpretation of things. That's a feature, not a bug.  We have to do it. If we doubted everything we were seeing and hearing every minute of the day, we would crack up.  For the brain to perfectly process everything would take more time and energy than makes sense for it to use.  So, it takes short cuts.  It fills in gaps in data through interpolation and extends interpretation beyond the data through extrapolation.  

So, we can't stop to question ALL interpretations.  But we should question some of them.

This is an education blog, so let's take it to the classroom.  Is it possible that we sometimes misinterpret student behavior?  When that student who is always out of his seat without permission, do we take the mental shortcut of assuming that EVERY shift he makes in his chair is about to be a rule violation? Do we hear the first half a question and assume we know what the student is asking?  Do we see a kid in the hallway and assume she is skipping class because she has done so in the past? Kids who have been trouble makers in the past have often complained that they don't feel like teachers will let them grow and change because of their past behavior.  Do they have a point?  Do we over-interpret their actions because our brains are taking a totally normal mental shortcut?

How about your colleagues.  Do you make assumptions, not just about the action you see them doing but about their internal life?  Do you assign motive based on your past history with them?  Do you assume they are short tempered because you see them snap at a student without knowing the week long history that led up to that moment?  Do you know the whole story, or do you tell yourself a story?

I had this conversation recently about a man who was very irritated with his boss.  He was using some strong terms, like "bait and switch" during our conversation.  I had to say, "Okay, slow down" and walked him through this way of thinking.  There are three things happening here.

1. Facts
2. Feelings about facts
3. The interpretation of the facts as they are processed through your feelings.

The facts were real. He was accurately relaying the story of WHAT had happened.  His feelings were real.  He was rightly irritated by WHAT his boss had done. It's that third part where things get fictional. His brain was going beyond what he knew to be true in order to construct a story. It was filling in the gaps of what happened with WHY they happened, leading him to assign motive that was almost certainly not accurate. His boss is not a manipulator or a liar, so the term bait and switch was unfair. If he were processing the facts through a different set of feelings, the story he was telling himself would be far different.

Part of what makes teaching difficult is how many pieces of data we have to interpret and how little time we have to reflect properly.  We often react quickly to our rapid interoperation simply because there isn't time to slow down.  My encouragement to you would be to slow down as much as you are able to, knowing it might not be much.  

• That extra second before responding to a child might make a difference in your relationship with them because it might give you just enough distance to assume the best rather than the worst.
• That extra minute it takes to remind yourself of what you know for sure about your colleague might prevent weeks of awkward interactions with them.
• Taking a few class periods before answering a parent email will allow you to answer in a more tactful way. It is much better for them to experience a delay in your response than for them to experience the response you would give while your blood pressure was still high.

I've strayed a bit from the point here, so let me close the circle.  What you think you see isn't always representative of reality.  It's worth asking if you know the whole story. If not, hold your own certainty in check, and be open to changing your story after you know more.