Human limitations and then some!

Have you ever walked by a stockade-type fence, found a knothole in it, then looked at what’s taking place on the other side of the fence through that peephole?  A great deal of our lives is framed by that example.  That is, we obtain information about the world we live in through a very small antennae, mounted upon a tiny pedestal, and often pointed in a well-defined, carefully selected direction.  And yet, despite these limitations, the way we view the world is dependent upon the information obtained through this single, small, and somewhat insignificant antennae.  Knowing this puts all that we know and all that we think we know in proper perspective—and then some! 

Through my many years of writing and teaching about public speaking, one of my goals has always been to impress upon students the limitations of much of their personal experience.  A personal experience, although powerful in its ability to hold the attention of listeners (and this must be acknowledged), is rendered nearly meaningless in its ability to prove a point or as evidence to support a conclusion.  For that, the opinions of credible people supported by facts and statistics are not just important but necessary.  That is precisely what makes research and investigation so necessary. 

Why is a student’s personal experience meaningless?  Often, it is for the same reasons that one person’s point of view—eyewitness testimony—can matter so little in a court of law.  In a court of law it counts for little and is often contradicted by other eyewitness testimony.  It is just one person’s point of view and it is likely to be distorted. 

How is it distorted?  It is what we do with information that comes through our minuscule antennae that causes the problems.  Most information comes to us in a random, unstructured manner.  We must do something with it—modify it!—to make sense of it.  First, we determine relationships: how does the new information relate to other information we are receiving and to information we already have?  Look out the window where you are sitting right now.  Can you view nature as if there were no structure?  Our world, for us to understand it, requires organization, and when we get random, unstructured information from our world, as we do every waking moment, we organize it by perceiving relationships—relationships we form from things we already know and understand. 

How do we organize the information from our meager antennae?   First, because information often comes in small pieces, we try to put it into a larger context so that we can understand the pieces better.  This is a process called enlarging in which we look for a frame of reference for the message or messages—a frame of reference from our perspective. 

You can understand the process of enlarging, for example, when you notice a nonverbal expression emitted by someone with whom you are having a conversation.  Suddenly, you detect an expression of sadness or grief.  Immediately you start observing the whole nonverbal picture —the facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and vocal tones of the person sending the message—and trying to place the expression you have observed into that picture.  The fewer the pieces of information you have received, the more enlargement must take place. 

The second way we have of organizing the information we get from our very modest antennae is simplifying.  Just as we search for a relationship between pieces of information and a larger framework into which we can place those pieces, we also look for ways to simplify complex or confusing stimuli.  Complex stimuli are those we have difficulty understanding.  We simplify information by finding patterns, an order (derived from all that we know or observe) that will help us make sense of the message. 

For example, if you drive into a gas station to get directions, you might hear the attendant say something like, “You go up here to your first stoplight and turn left on Broadview.  At your next light turn right.  Then just after you pass Wiley High School, turn right, and the street you are looking for will be your next left.”  As a simplifying response you might reply, “So, it’s a left, two rights, and a left.”  We look for order in stimuli that will help us remember the essential information.  It is an order established by our brain from our experiences—based on all we know and understand. 

Stereotyping, the process of assigning a fixed label or category to things or people we encounter, is one method we have of simplifying information.  All human beings employ stereotypes to deal with the tremendous flow of events around them.   

The third method of organizing information from your diminutive antennae is closing.  It is the process of filling in gaps between pieces of information.  Although we think in unified wholes, we get information in separate scraps; thus, we must put information together to make it complete rather than fragmented.  It is like filling in the pieces of a puzzle we are missing; to do it, however, we draw from what we already know and understand. 

We probably engage in closing (or closure) more often than we realize.  For example, how often have you completed a sentence for the person you were talking to?  The more you get to know people, the better you know how they think, and the more often you will think ahead and close their thoughts—or think for them.  Very close friends can say a great deal to each other with few words; without realizing it, they may depend on closure for their messages to get through.  Just remember, however, we are the ones filling in the gaps. 

Another example of closing is when you overhear others talking but are able to pick up only fragments of their conversation.  From the fragments you fill in the rest of the conversation.  Have you ever sat in a bus station, airport, or next to a busy sidewalk and made up stories about the people you observed around you?  From a minimum of cues you put together a fairly complete story, making sense of the available information by closure.  Though it may make sense to you, it is unlikely to be correct.  It is a figment of your imagination, but if you were to act, you would respond based on what you think or you believe or you feel. 

Then, when you add proximity and role to the mix of enlarging, simplifying, and closing, you begin to see why a single personal example may be wildly inappropriate, inaccurate, or simply, unjustified.  Proximity is simply your nearness to the event with respect to where you are located, the time that the event takes place, or your relationship to the event or people in it.  If you are a distance away, it is early morning and you are barely awake, and you have no relationship to the people involved, your viewpoint is likely to be distorted.  And your role relates to your expectations, needs, attitudes, and beliefs about the situation; your role restricts how you perceive situations whether it is a job role, family role, sex role, friendship role, or any of a number of others. 

When people are offering a single, personal viewpoint of anything, it really caries very little meaning beyond what it is.  It is an instance, anecdote, or singular example.  In general, when it comes to viewing things, people are untrained, untaught, unschooled, unskilled, unpracticed, uninitiated, ill-equipped, ill-prepared, unqualified, nonprofessional, and inexperienced.  They see what they see and nothing more.  Much as you need to respect their point of view, and their willingness to share it, in the larger scheme of things, it is an example of our human limitations. 

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At the website Cycleback.com there is a terrific essay that discusses perception entitled, “Movement Perception and Misperception,” by David Rudd Cycleback.  Cycleback ends his first paragraph saying, “The human uses its complex mental template to make the final perception, or judgment of what is going on. The template was formed by experience, knowledge, genetic tendencies, physiological abilities (your visual template is literally blind to the ultraviolet light that birds see, and the infrared light snakes see), personal bias, aesthetics, etc. Often the final interpretation, or perception, is a correct representation of what is being viewed. Sometimes the perception is off."

At the Scientific American website, there is a terrific essay, “Limits of Perception,” by editor in chief, Mariette DiChristina.  She begins her essay with a quotation by Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism : “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”  DiChristina goes on to discuss the interference of “noise” in the brain’s functioning.  It is easy to conclude that all perceptions are affected by “noise,” and it is “noise” that, in part, limits our ability to perceive accurately. 

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Copyright June, 2010, by And Then Some Publishing, LLC.