Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

by Amy E. Herman

Those who fled without first assessing what was happening ran right into the gunmen’s line of fire. Those who waited, evaluated, and figured out that it was a terrorist attack found safe hiding places.

especially when things are calm, resist the urge to rush past the what, or you’ll leave behind valuable facts you might not otherwise have recovered.

scuff

Noting the facts of your location—what’s around you or the subject of any scene you are studying—can be critical or even life-saving if something unexpected happens.

Situational awareness is imperative for decision making in many situations from air traffic control and emergency services to driving a car or maneuvering a bicycle along a busy street.

egress

Automat.

Automats were “restaurants” without waiters. Self-service vending machines lined the walls; patrons could choose whatever food they wanted for a combination of nickels. Horn & Hardart opened the first Automat in 1902; at one point it was the world’s largest restaurant chain, serving 800,000 people a day. Automats typically had round tables with white Carrara glass tops, as we see in the Hopper painting. And they were well known for the best coffee in town.

Wikipedia suggests that the first automat was opened in Berrin in 1895. Not in 1902.

yellow bruises typically indicate that at least eighteen hours have passed since the initial impact.

The importance of objective description applies equally to seemingly inconsequential things in life such as a cappuccino order. Getting it right requires an accurate and descriptive order that starts with the customer, continues with the cashier, and ends with the barista. Any laziness in observation or communication can cost time, money, and frustration for all parties. Is a botched cup of coffee really a big deal? It is if you can’t face the day without your morning cup, or if you’re in the business of selling coffee. Small errors add up.

ABPs, or “able-bodied passengers”—people they can count on to assist in an emergency.

forlorn

What’s the big deal with “coffee shop” versus “holds a cup and saucer”? A lot. Where she is hasn’t been proven or disproven. To state something as important as location as a fact, even casually, especially to someone unfamiliar with the scene or someone down the chain of information, can lead to more untrue assumptions that turn into “facts.”

schlumpy

Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble.

The earlier the assumption is made, the more dangerous it is because it skews subsequent observations. Accuracy in the first stages of the observation process is critical.

bodice,

“refrigerator blindness”

garishly

fidget

We can see her garnet and diamond wedding ring on her left ring finger; however, close examination of that hand in the mahogany table shows that the ring is missing.

police officers in high-crime neighborhoods are trained to not put their hands in their pockets because it sends a signal of authority or boredom, and officers should remain ready and alert.

COBRA—which stands for Camouflaged, One, Break, Realign, Ask—will

will help us uncover hidden details by reminding us to concentrate on the camouflaged, work on one thing at a time, take a break, realign our expectations, and ask someone else to look with us.

concentrating on just one thing can seem counterintuitive, but in reality multitasking leads to less effective and efficient work, since our brains cannot keep track of or focus on a million things at once. How many can we manage? A new study puts the limit of our working memory at a less-than-impressive four things.

people who regularly multitasked were “terrible at ignoring irrelevant information, terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized, and terrible at switching from one task to another.”

it’s been reported that average workers have thirty to one hundred projects on their agenda, are interrupted seven times an hour and distracted up to 2.1 hours a day—but Forbes magazine insists that “focus is a mental muscle that you have to develop, especially if yours has been weakened by years of multitasking.” This is one of the reasons I don’t allow phones in my class and enjoy taking people out of their offices. Without constant distractions hovering about, people can really focus on what they’re observing, and as a result, they see so much more.

we can keep our cognitive control system from losing vigilance and help retain long-term focus by simply taking breaks. The formula recommended by experts is twofold. First, take a brief mental break every twenty minutes:

Second, relax for ten minutes for every ninety minutes worked. Take a walk, outside if possible; exercise,

since every person perceives the world differently, you might want to enlist help in your search. Bring someone in to look with fresh eyes, preferably someone with a different perspective, background, and opinions from yours.

smirk,

disheveled

The rainbow was added to symbolize that America’s first president had brought the young country through the storms of the previous decades and that prosperous days were ahead.

linchpins

Sometimes we’re so busy looking for the answer that we miss the information that can get us there.

We’ve learned how to master the fine art of observation: to gather only facts, to sort the objective from the subjective, and to keep an eye out for both the small details and bigger, but sometimes hidden, information. Now we’re going to unleash our inner intelligence analyst and figure out how to make sense of what we’ve found.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. —ALBERT SZENT-GYÖRGYI

favela,

ramshackle

In art, perspective refers to the actual angle from which a work will be seen. It is carefully considered and in many cases manipulated by the artist to purposefully direct the viewer’s eye.

Perspective, from the Latin word perspicere, meaning “to look through,” is defined as the point of view from which something is considered or evaluated.

Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.

trod,

toddled

languishing,

furrowed.

squint.

pisello,

scrawled

keep your head on a swivel. Instead of defaulting to what’s right in front of us, we must keep shifting our perspective. Doing so can help us find more information, more of the story, the missing piece, the right path, the true intent, or even the way out.