How Perception Shapes Our Sense of Reality

We feel somber on cloudy, foggy mornings. When the sun’s bright over snow, our bodies reflect the sunshine. What a beautiful day! We’re somewhat less aware of the fact that overcast weather is usually matched by the presence of low pressure and contrariwise a blue sky usually means high pressure—and that this affects our bodies too.

We also tend altogether to ignore that which repeats and is therefore unremarkable. Once decades ago I was driving to the airport in Washington, DC at around five in the morning in the dark, taking the Beltway (495 to 395)—the freeway thick, thick, thick with traffic. Suddenly it struck me forcefully that these hundreds, thousands of cars and trucks, roaring together at very high speeds—were all performing perfectly! Hundreds of thousands of tires were holding the air, millions of ball-bearings were smoothly rolling, nicely lubricated in clean oil; similar numbers of pistons translated millions of explosions per second all around me into motion; headlights flawlessly lit our way… And an intuition burst upon me of the vast and entirely ignored mass of human care and virtue that produced this harmonious, high-speed process moving these thousands of people to their destinations.

We notice what changes—the weather. We notice what goes wrong. That which works, and smoothly—that we ignore. It’s a biological arrangement, to be sure. Ever alert for danger. Ever prepared for adaptation. But we black-box whatever smoothly works. How many of us sit down with a paper and take even two minutes gratefully to admire the flawless operations of our digestive system? But if indigestion should happen to strike. Whoa! All bets are off in our rush for the Tums.

A troubled youth shoots down a member of Congress, kills a judge, a child, others; wounds yet other innocents in a Safeway parking lot. An artificial weather system—the electronic media—brings the news instantly. It’s all over the airwaves. The cable channels have cleared the decks. Intense focus—except for the supposedly startling discontinuity of ads—but the odd thing is that we’re so used to ads we don’t find these commercial pauses odd at all. The shooting in Arizona has a much greater impact on our sense of reality than the fact that yesterday—what? some 6.9 billion people?—yes, some 6.9 billion people had perfectly ordinary days, days on which, like the day before, the toilets flushed, the refrigerator kept the cold, the doctor was there for the appointment, the car started, the bucket held water, the streetcars ran, the light switch worked. Curious contrasts. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket? No, not quite yet. For that, presumably, we’ll have to wait until December 2012 when, if the History Channel has read Nostradamus correctly, Armageddon will finally arrive.

Scan, Surf, Read

Functionally the Internet is like a paper and unlike a book. Papers can be scanned; books must be read. The very organization of a paper—with headlines, subheads—facilitates scanning. In the old days the lead paragraph was still uniformly a kind of digest or summary of the longer story that followed—so that the scanning eye could rapidly orient itself and choose to read or skip.

This act of survey, the act of quick examination, search, of scanning, the scan of the horizon is in part preparation for concentrated attention to some detail that, in the person’s personal context, signals the need to focus. In part it is a kind of on-going orientation in which the rapid, almost automatic noting of the same-old, same-old is as much a part of the act as the detection of significance, meaning the detection of unusual, noteworthy change.

Reading—even of a story in the paper—produces a different state. The quality of the attention changes. It’s perceptible; it’s a physical sensation. The sensation of motion, of gliding, of almost flying motion stops. A gathering of force is felt. The attention thickens and deepens. The perception of time also undergoes a change.

The physiology of this process, of this difference—between scanning or surfing and reading—is worth some careful consideration. In the scanning, in the surfing process the individual is open to stimulus, indeed is seeking it. He or she is out there, in the world, engaged. The richer that world, the more it changes, the more frequently new stimuli appear to draw the eye, the more engaging the mere survey becomes. And individual items, in that flow, however enticing they might appear to be, always suffer a kind of discount—because the next thing over might be more interesting.

Now, by contrast, to deepen concentration sufficiently to read an item is to leave the world, to go within, to descend, as it were, from a moving surface to a place where motion seems to stop and a kind of silence reigns. A short little item, in this context, is less threatening than a long one—because it promises rapid release so that the breathless scanning can resume.

Unless the person engaged in this activity has long since learned that seclusion from the world can bring much greater delights than skimming the surface—and has developed the necessary skills of discipline and concentration to get value from the process—the very medium in which information is presented will influence both its use (or non-use) and its presentation. I think it is a truism that more people “read” newspapers than books—and that the Internet is causing the slow demise of its printed counter-part. And on the Internet itself, the shorter the message, the more likely that it will reap a rich harvest of hits. New devices for “keeping in touch” are the hottest consumer products—and they prove that the most compelling “information” is information about our friends. As for institutions, even the most somber now have their Twitter feeds. Oh yes. The spelling must be streamlined too. And formality signals “out of it.”  In  that spirit I will close here, sayin’: See ya l8er, alig8er…