{"id":526,"date":"2010-11-06T14:44:43","date_gmt":"2010-11-06T14:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saasoft.com\/blog\/?p=526"},"modified":"2010-11-06T14:44:43","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T14:44:43","slug":"when-is-seeing-believing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=526","title":{"rendered":"When Is Seeing Believing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>One of the problems with our caveman brains is that they are a bit slow. It may not feel that way but they are – and if you don’t believe me try this experiment: Stand up, get a book, hold it in your left hand open\u00a0it at any page, hold a coin in your right hand between finger and thumb so that it will land on the floor\u00a0when you drop it. Then close your eyes and count to three. Open your eyes, drop the coin,\u00a0and immediately start reading the book. How long is it before you are consciously aware of the meaning of the words. My guess is that the coin\u00a0hits the floor about the same time\u00a0that you start to\u00a0making sense of what is on the page. That means it takes about\u00a0half a second to start perceiving what you are seeing. That long delay is a problem because the world around us is often changing\u00a0much faster than that and,\u00a0to survive,\u00a0we need to keep up. So what we do is\u00a0fill in the gaps –\u00a0what we perceive is a combination of what we actually see and what we expect to see – the process is seamless,\u00a0automatic and unconscious. And that is OK so long as expectation and reality stay in tune – but what happens when\u00a0they don’t? We experience\u00a0the “Eh?” effect\u00a0which\u00a0signals that\u00a0we are temporarily confused – an uncomfortable and scary feeling which resolves when\u00a0we re-align\u00a0our perception\u00a0with reality. Over time we\u00a0all learn to avoid that uncomfortable confusion feeling with a simple mind trick\u00a0– we just filter out the things we see that do\u00a0not fit our expectation. Psychologists call this “perceptual distortion” and\u00a0the effect\u00a0is even greater\u00a0when we look with our minds-eye rather than our real eyes – then\u00a0we only\u00a0perceive \u00a0what we expect to see and we avoid the uncomfortable “Eh?” effect completely.\u00a0 This\u00a0unconscious\u00a0behaviour we all demonstrate\u00a0is\u00a0called\u00a0self-delusion\u00a0and\u00a0it is a powerful barrier to improvement – because to improve we have to first accept that what we have is not good enough and that\u00a0reality does not match\u00a0our expectation.<\/p>\n

To become a master of improvement it is necessary to learn to be comfortable with the “eh?” feeling\u00a0–\u00a0to disconnect it from the negative\u00a0emotion of fear that drives the denial reaction and self-justifying behaviour\u00a0– and instead to reconnect it to the positive emotion of\u00a0excitement that drives the curiosity action and exploratory behaviour.\u00a0 One ewasy way\u00a0to generate the “eh?” effect is to perform\u00a0reality checks – to consciously compare what\u00a0we actually see with what\u00a0we expect to see.\u00a0 That is not easy because our perception is very slippery – we are all very,very good at perceptual distortion.\u00a0A\u00a0way\u00a0around this\u00a0is to present ourselves with a\u00a0picture of realilty\u00a0over time,\u00a0using the\u00a0past as a baseline, and our understanding of the system, we can predict what\u00a0we\u00a0believe will happen in the near future. We\u00a0then\u00a0compare what actually happens with our expectation.\u00a0 Any significant deviations\u00a0are “eh?” effects that we can use to focus our curiosity – for there hide the nuggets of new knowledge.\u00a0 But\u00a0how do we know what is a “signifcant” deviation? To\u00a0answer that we\u00a0must avoid using our slippery self-delusional perception system – we need\u00a0a tool that is designed to do\u00a0this interpretation safely, easily,\u00a0and quickly.\u00a0 Click here<\/a> for an example of such a tool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the problems with our caveman brains is that they are a bit slow. It may not feel that way but they are – and if you don’t believe me try this experiment: Stand up, get a book, hold it in your left hand open\u00a0it at any page, hold a coin in your right … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “When Is Seeing Believing?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,42,43,45],"tags":[57,82,86,88,96,105,112,156,199,234,240],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-questions","category-how","category-why","category-what","tag-baseline","tag-curiosity","tag-decision","tag-delusion","tag-distortion","tag-emotion","tag-fear","tag-learning","tag-perception","tag-reality","tag-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}