How your mind cheats you on a daily basis

Mental perspective, like the perspective in a picture, relies on tricking your mind. You think you�€™re seeing the full picture, but you are not. What you have is limited and partial information, filled out with assumptions, beliefs, and other purely mental constructions. Only time and careful examination will distinguish genuine facts from the products of your imagination.

The TV news anchor turns to the guest expert and asks: �€œWhat�€™s your perspective on the latest statement by the White House?�€� A thousand pundits claim to bring �€œa fresh perspective�€� to some problem they hope you have. Marketers claim their products �€œwill change your perspective�€�— on diapers, or computer software, or whatever. Everyone, it seems, has a perspective; and nearly everyone else wants to change it right now to match theirs.

Like all overused words, perspective has lost most of its original meaning. Now it usually means little more than �€œopinion,�€� as in �€œthis is our party�€™s perspective on the budgetary cuts being proposed by Senator Bigwig.�€� This is a pity. The problems of reducing a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional picture make a much better analogy with how the human mind works.

Creating perspective . . . the fake kind

An artist must reduce a scene with height, breadth and depth—the familiar three dimensions—to a drawing or painting that has only length and height. Done badly, the result is comic, with all the wrong size relationships between objects. Before perspective was discovered, pictures bore only a symbolic resemblance to what people saw. The size of a painted figure depended more on their importance than reality. Pharaoh would dwarf hundreds of enemies because the painter knew who was paying. Figures were drawn in profile because no one know how to make them look solid, let alone show their real size and distance relationship to anyone else in the same scene. It took thousands of years to realize that changes in size and placement would trick the mind into seeing depth.

Our minds face a similar difficulty in reducing the unworkable complexity of the world to something we can grasp and act on. Instead of three dimensions, they must cope with many more: time, for example; importance, urgency, meaning and relevance. What reaches your conscious mind must come complete with a sense of what it is, why it matters, and what you need to do about it.

How does your mind trick you into thinking you have a complete picture? By using your assumptions, values, beliefs, opinions and expectations. It presents you with limited and partial information and uses those extra elements to fill in the missing pieces.

Elements of mental perspective

This perspective, the mental one, relies on trickery, just as physical perspective does. The skilled artist tricks the eye into seeing depth where none exists. The brain tricks the conscious mind into seeing something as complete and solid and ready for action, where there is little or no substance to justify the picture. We believe we understand our world. In reality, all we have is an incomplete model, got up to look like the real thing.

Your assumptions, values, beliefs and opinions supply assumed answers to the questions you ought to be asking of the situation—and of yourself. �€œDo I understand this clearly? Precisely what does this mean? Am I sure?�€� Like a painter creating the illusion of perspective, your mind takes one or two understandable pieces of information and completes the picture from all those pre-set categories and assumed patterns. It seems real, though most of the image is based on little more than past ideas, guesswork and imagination.

Assumptions are close at hand, quick and simple to use, and feel justified on the basis of experience or prior expectations. They are also dangerous and unreliable. This event may fit into a known pattern, or it may not. Assuming it does means accepting a risk you do not need to take; a risk born of complacency and the unwillingness to wait long enough to find a definitive answer.

Getting your perspective back . . . the real one

It�€™s hard to avoid making assumptions. You do it without becoming aware of what you have done. Haste and pressure, as always, make the problem worse. Without sufficient time or presence of mind to stop and consider, you move ahead on the basis of an assumption that�€™s no better than a guess. But you still move. And when so much is pushing you from behind, any movement can seem preferable to standing still and waiting until the situation becomes clearer.

Immediate gratification has become the characteristic requirement of our times. People at all levels of society see it as a right: to have whatever they want—an answer, a piece of information, personal satisfaction, a product or a service—and have it now. Fast food, fast turnaround, instant messages and immediate information via the Internet; everything you wish for, and all without a wait.

What does true perspective require?

• Time: to look at the situation from many angles and see it fully, instead of seeing just a part and filling in the rest with assumptions.
• Curiosity: to explore and questions, instead of relying on first impressions and other people�€™s statements.
• Skepticism: to demand that you test every aspect and reach your own conclusions. Truth should be your authority, not the other way around.
• Patience: to keep trying to understand until, finally, you do. No short-cuts.
• Insight: which is the final result of all the others, aided by a large dash of learning.

[ratings]

Technorati Tags: perspective, mental perspective, assumptions, beliefs, opinions, relying on first impressions,