Welcome to Our times, Today and Tomorrow. If you’re a leader or a thought leader, this could be the place for you. In this multipart series we begin talking about perceptions and how they influence us.
(Coming as soon as it’s ready: Listen to the Podcast instead.)
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein quoted on brainyquote.com
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. Arthur Koestler quoted on Brainyquote.com
It’s becoming more and more difficult to separate truth from fiction in today’s world. I once stopped reading fiction for twenty years because writers took too much license with fact – just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean it's an extension of scientific reality or the human condition (grounded fantasy or sci-fi).
My wife tells me she thinks I’m sexy when she sees me vacuuming. My illusion is that this view will continue after I finish vacuuming. Nope.
(Image by openclipart-vectors-30363 on Pixabay)
If you’ve ever done mechanical drawing you’ll instantly realize that the above image doesn’t exist in reality, but only on paper. (Prove me wrong.) Just because you can draw it doesn’t mean can exist. As in my previous article and podcast I mentioned that some science and religion sounds good but doesn’t hold water.
You’re likely familiar with many illusion images posted on social media – they're our favorites. Finding colored letters in obscured images shows that many of us don’t see certain colors. Other images show that when other colors are present the color we focus on changes in brightness or color.
We find illusions in many different areas of our lives. For instance, many know eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. According to an Ohio State University study, mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for over half of all wrongful convictions. Yet we think we know what we saw.
One famous experiment had someone dash through a courtroom in front of a jury. Later descriptions identified the person as a man when it was a woman. There were other discrepancies as well. Do we really know what we saw?
It isn’t just that memory is unreliable. It actually can become less reliable as time passes and new information is added. Memory can shift from, “I think that’s the guy,” to “I’m positive that’s the guy!” You know, the one who is perfectly innocent.
False repressed memories
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories and their problems. She wrote the book, The Myth of Repressed Memories at the height of the false repressed memory phase of the 1980s and 1990s. During this time people in daycare centers and other places were falsely accused of abusing children.
The reality of that time was that those who were doing interviews with children led them to make false accusations by the way they phrased their questions. Their questions planted a seed for these children to think about. At the next interview they had a story ready which they believed to be true. Several innocent people were sent to prison.
In general psychologists note that we really don’t suppress traumatic memories as much as ignore them. When we need to retrieve them we can. Not that repression never happens, it’s just rarer than what some assume.
In this TED Talk, How reliable is your memory? Loftus talks about memory problems and how false memories get implanted.
A different phenomenon called confabulation happens with the elderly who develop memory problems and similarly with others who have memory problems. As some memories are forgotten, the brain tries to make sense of people and events who appear in their lives. They may recognize some people as someone they aren’t, such as a family member.
They may string together stories from different events in their lives and fill in the gaps with new events that never happened. Or even fill in with events from TV and movies. The person has no idea they are doing this. Our brains always try to fill in the gaps and make sense of our world.
Can we trust our perceptions?
This all leads to the question, can we trust our perceptions? Some say that their perceptions are reality, and they are partially correct in this thinking. But psychologists note that believing misperceptions can eventually make you delusional. This is a neurotic type of thinking that can lead to paranoia and other problems.
There are many practical implications regarding our perceptions, such as misidentifying innocent people so that they go to prison, creating false repressed memories that send people to jail, and making a fine mess of our own minds so that we develop a neurotic thought pattern that disrupts our lives and others.
In World War 2, it was noted that many soldiers fired their guns but purposefully missed so that they wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of killing another person. Does the same thing happen with identifying crime suspects or with juries? It’s challenging to live with sending another person to years in prison. This is particularly true with Stockholm Syndrome in which people develop a bond with their captors.
Practical spiritual example: Helping the needy
I see most of what we do in life as spiritual expression. It’s true in how we treat the needy. On the one hand, in New York City and other major cities people can make an adequate living panhandling. Adequate means instead of living in their parent's closet they can move to their neighbor’s garage.
In other areas when we see a panhandler begging for money, work, gas, etc., what do we think? Do we immediately think of the major city problem? Or do we find other convenient thoughts for dismissing the person, such as, “He just needs to get a job.”
When we drill down on this we find that job loss is a major cause of homelessness. Then the person isn’t qualified for any of the jobs available in the area and can’t move. Or they have no transportation or means to get anywhere, or any of a thousand other tragedies that place people in this situation.
US Housing and Urban Development found that there are around 582,000 people homeless in the US. Many are permanent due to mental illness. Thankfully most of the ones who lose jobs eventually get new ones.
In Los Angeles you see the sidewalks in some areas crowded with people who pitched tents because even though they may have jobs they can’t afford a home on those incomes in this incredibly expensive city. We can be very quick to assign blame without thinking their situations through.
How many bad actors are needed to justify ignoring those in need? One in ten? Five in ten? Nine in ten? Or is just the characterization that all are “on the take,” enough to prevent helping?
The Bible has a fascinating story about how many bad actors it takes. In the Biblical story of Abraham, Lot, and Sodom's wickedness, the city had a reputation as a posterchild for mistreating visitors. Lacking hospitality for visitors was a grave enough situation in that era and area. Visitors were supposed to be taken into homes and fed, and allowed to stay a day or two. In many areas it’s still the same today.
Their reputation was the people were overfed and unconcerned; they didn’t help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before God. Among the Jews of the time they had a reputation for even murdering visitors.
Abraham pleaded with the Lord who came to destroy Sodom, saying that if there were only a few good people would the Lord reconsider? It turned out there were none except his brother Lot.
We don't know for sure where Sodom was located but archaeologists have a reasonable idea. Archaeological evidence of the ruins of a likely city in that area shows that it was somehow destroyed by fire such as might happen from a meteor storm.
Not to overthink this, since stories arise from natural events to make sense of them, but maybe the story was completely true, or maybe partly true. We can’t know for certain. Anyway it raises the question I mentioned: “How many people do we need to be bad actors before we turn away all those in need?” What if we were the just one?
What does this mean to me?
We trust our perceptions and probably should because we have to live in this world as best we can. But we should always ask ourselves if our perceptions are accurate because we easily get misperceptions. Misperceptions put innocent people in jail, harm our mental lives, and prevent us from social and spiritual responsibilities.
The next few articles in this series are more about perception and how we are fooled.
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