Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

by Amy E. Herman

My life was in the hands of a virtual stranger and his ability to see and accurately convey what he saw.

How many times do our lives depend upon someone else’s observation skills?

For most of us, it’s too many to count: whenever we get on an airplane or a train, into a taxicab, or onto an operating table. It’s not always life-or-death; sometimes it’s just life-altering.

Other people’s attention to detail and follow-through can also...

reputation, our safety, and our success. And we can affect theirs. It’s a responsibility we shouldn’t take lightly, as it can mean the difference between a promotion and a demotion, between a triumph and a ...

I wanted to know more about the mechanics of how we see and how simply looking at art could improve.

A single missed detail or miscommunicated word can just as easily botch a cappuccino order, a million-dollar contract, or a murder investigation.

Think of this book as your new self-portrait. You can use it to step back and see yourself through new eyes. What do you look like to the world? How well do you communicate? How well do you observe? What’s behind you and around you and inside you?

We find only the world we look for. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

To see what’s there that others don’t. To see what’s not there that should be. To see the opportunity, the solution, the warning signs, the quickest way, the way out, the win. To see what matters.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”

“Studying the retina is our easiest way into the brain,” Seung explains, “because it is the brain.”

In 1908, Harvard psychologists discovered that the brain is most effective at learning new material when stress hormones are slightly elevated by a

novel experience, a theory verified by modern brain imaging.

We’re simply using art as confirmable visual data, talking about what we see—or what we think we see.

“the four As”—how to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt.

“We are all too much inclined,” he said, “to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked.”

Slowing down doesn’t mean being slow, it just means taking a few minutes to absorb what we are seeing. Details, patterns, and relationships take time to register. Nuances and new information can be missed if we rush past them.

Portable technology is not just a sensory distraction; we allow it to be a sensory substitution.

powers of observation. McDonald says, “Students need to realize that no matter how helpful technology has become, it is no match [for] a good set of eyes and a brain.”

Sir Isaac Newton agreed, stating, “If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

seeing can be thought of as the automatic, involuntary recording of images. Observing is seeing, but consciously, carefully, and thoughtfully.

You attend to one thing, and effectively your brain suppresses or filters out everything else.”

Inattentional blindness can affect the best professionals in all fields, even those whose job entails looking for details.

While most people can see, not everyone sees the same things. This premise gets more complicated when we’re looking at things that aren’t as black-and-white as a black-and-white photograph and could be subject to so many interpretations.

It seems obvious that we all see things differently. Yet we constantly forget, and act as if there is only one true way to see.

However, knowing now that we are all susceptible to inattentional blindness and other perceptual errors, we cannot assume that anyone else sees what we see, that we see what they see, or that either of us accurately sees what’s really there.

Much like seeing, the process of perceiving is subtle, automatic, and hard to recognize if we’re not consciously aware of it.

The power of your new knowledge—that it is a cow—has effectively

erased your previous perceptions.

Being aware of how easily our perceptions can change, and refuse to un-change, can help us to be attuned to them.

If two parents who are the same age, and came from the same race, socioeconomic class, and physical location, don’t see things the same way, think of how differently disparate people do: employers and employees, defenders and prosecutors, Republicans and Democrats, teachers and students, doctors and patients, caregivers and children.

To get the most accurate picture of anything, we need to see others’ perceptions and recognize others’ points of view.

Of course not everyone is going to like the same things—we are all subjective beings—but what’s important to note is that our subjectivity can color the “truth” of what we see.

When searching for facts, we need to separate subjective discoveries from objective ones,

Here I want to emphasize that subjective filters and their subjective findings aren’t necessarily useless. We don’t need to toss them out automatically. Instead, use the way other people look at things to lead you to new facts you might have missed otherwise.

Seeing What We Want to See This very common filter goes by many different names, including cognitive bias, confirmation bias, myside bias, wishful seeing, and tunnel vision. It puts us at risk of gathering information selectively, subconsciously seeking data that support our expectations and ignoring those that don’t.

To make sure you aren’t

mistaking your desires for facts, ask yourself two questions: “Is this information consistent with what I initially thought?” and “Does this information benefit me personally or professionally?”

To offset this, pay special attention to any outside suggestions or restrictions that might be placed on your observation skills.

Focusing all of our attention on benchmarks and checking off boxes will inhibit a complete and accurate analysis from the start.

Look first ↓ Consult other preexisting information or opinions ↓ Look again

When we go into any situation thinking it’s going to be the same thing we’ve seen or done before, we’re putting up our own perceptual filter that will make any change even harder to find.

The resulting blinders can cause us to miss important details, to go into autopilot, or worse, to become presumptuous about our expertise, abilities, or safety.

They may have seen or handled similar things or cases or people but not the new one in front of them; that one has never existed before.

While crises are crucibles that quickly bring organizational failings to light, they aren’t the only situations where we need to accurately catalog and communicate what we see. We must be able to objectively survey the scene in which we find ourselves, sort fact from fiction, prioritize information, and disseminate it efficiently in all manner of instances—whether it’s our life or our livelihood that hangs in the balance.

Likewise, moving too quickly or too early in many situations—implementing a solution to a business problem, reprimanding an employee, or walking away from a relationship—without confirmation of the facts can be detrimental and in some situations fatal.

Just because someone says something is a fact doesn’t make it so. People lie, and as we’ve just learned, we can’t even rely on our own eyes to always tell us the truth. To make sure a fact is a fact, you need to verify it every time.

By definition, a fact is “a truth known by actual experience or observation.”

Any laziness in observation or communication can cost time, money, and frustration for all parties.