Beware of your own blind spots

The Information age is a fertile pool especially for the “needy” – whether it is you feeling the need or wanting to feel needed. Everything and everyone around you is vying for your “attention” – highly prized because it is scarce and fleeting. There are just too many doors, windows and traps in the mystery menu we call life. Also, there are now so many channels, boosted to the heavens by social media, through which you are made aware of the limitless options for you to think about, pursue or watch out for.

That is why when someone manages to get a big number of people to focus on any one thing and rally behind it, s/he is considered a guru – political or religious. They provide a way, genuine or not, to organize all that chaos that seem to plague our existence on so many levels. These leaders claim they see the better, bigger picture and their followers believe them.  They say “THIS is the problem!” or “THIS is the answer!”  and we all rally our collective eyes to also seeing ONLY that. We see what our leader sees but we also become blind to everything else.

On a professional level, this is also why expertise remains highly valued – it presumes that the expert has devoted a lot of time and concentration on a particular domain and has learned how to be very good at it, spotting anomalies and recognizing it among a universe of things. This then makes “focus” a top asset – as it gives a keenly sharpened ability to see the target.

But what could you miss seeing when you are too focused in the way I described whether as a religious or political leader or an expert or a devoted follower of any of these? Well, this kind of focus ironically makes you blind.

For experts, you may miss the gorilla. In 2013, a study had radiologists look through CT scans to find nodules – an anomaly in the lungs that could signal lung cancer. But the researchers also embedded varying intensities of an image of a gorilla among the dark and light spots of the scan. Twenty out of the 24 radiologists did NOT see the gorilla. But compare this to the control group of non-radiologists – all of whom did not notice the gorilla.

This was a follow-through of a famous experiment in 1999. A group of researchers in Harvard showed a video to participants where six people, 3 in white shirts and 3 in black, passing a ball to each other. Before watching it, the participants were asked to count the number of passes that will be made to the ones wearing white shirts. At some point in the video, someone in a gorilla costume enters the scene and stays there moving about for a full 9 seconds. But was the gorilla seen? It turned out that only half of the participants saw the gorilla even if it would intuitively seem that something like a gorilla amidst a ball game would stand out.  

Scientists call this “inattentional blindness” or IB. It makes us doubt the scope of what we see even if the whole picture is being shown right before our very eyes. This I think would also help explain why we can’t seem to find what we are looking for and it would turn out it was because we were so focused on the exact picture of the thing, that we eliminated everything else that did not fit that exact mental image. The 1999 experiment showed us that we all have blind spots and the 2013 experiment showed that even experts have blind spots when our minds are focused on spotting only particular things. The “gorilla” then could be any surprising thing that comes your way while you are on a concentrated task involving work, play or daily living and you won’t see it because you are so concentrated. This is a lesson to us all when we set expectations of ourselves or of others too rigidly that we cannot recognize other things that may not have been expected but may be related or even better than your expectations. 

For the religious and political leaders, they could benefit to check their own blind spots against what scientists call the “confirmation bias.” It means that they are so convinced of what they believe to be THE ONE AND ONLY true way to living or leading that they will only spot what supports their own beliefs. In other words, they will be blind to the things that contradict their own thinking even if those things have been shown to be a real part of the picture. And with the powers they have, who will dare call their attention? 

That is why any one true ideology, religion or all-out wars on one thing are short-sighted and dangerous. They only see one target and blind to everything else, even to the most obvious of things that confound the scene. For everyday life, it is why it makes sense to watch a film more than once or read a novel again. You will inevitably notice things you did not previously notice.

This kind of blindness is inherent when we focus, so it is crucial that we are aware of it in order to check ourselves against it. We should listen to other views that do not necessarily support our own. Leaving room that you may be wrong ironically gives you the clearer vision. – Rappler.com