Each of us has an individual view of the world

Dr. Anil Seth from the University of Sussex in the UK is a neuroscientist researching perception and the brain. His research has illuminated how the brain makes assumptions based on our interpretations and experiences.  Seth’s study focused on how the brain sees color and what he found was that we interpret color individually.

Have you ever argued with someone about what color something was?  I have had this argument with my wife on many occasions. Each of us insisting that a something was a particular color, blue instead of purple, orange instead of pink, and unable to understand why the other just couldn’t see that it was that color.  According to Seth, this is not because we are color blind (as my wife tried to insist I was), but because our brains are interpreting color individually.

One of the examples of the brains interpretation of color is a well-known Internet social phenomenon that happened in 2015.   Simply known as “the dress” a heated debate ensued about the color of a dress posted in the social media photo platform Tumblr.  The dress pictured below, generating more than 73 million views in a matter of days.  Was it gold and white or black and blue (which do you see?). (The dress, 2018)

You would think it is a simple question and one that would be far from controversial, but it was a clear demonstration of how our brains individually interpret stimulus.

I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about “the dress” and even found myself wondering, can this be true, is there a visible difference in what people see? There is no doubt in my mind that I see the dress as gold and white.  But when I asked my son to tell me what color the dress was, with no other explanation, he immediately replied, it is blue and black. Not only did we both see the dress differently, but the colors were also as different as black and white.  I was astounded. 

The explanation lies in the research that Dr. Seth carried out on color.  He explains the dress is a perfect example of how we each have been programmed to see the world in distinct ways. For our brains, the stimulus we get is only ambiguous electrical signals that require processing to make sense. We do this through something called probabilistic inference where we try to match a new stimulus with prior expectations of what we think it could be. 

Our brain combines those prior expectations with signals coming from the outside world to create a “best guess” of what is going on. The brain is always at work desperate to make sense of the noisy and ambiguous flood of sensory information coming in.  

The reality is the dress is not white and gold but blue and black. Those of us that see it as white and gold are assuming that we see it in natural sunlight, while the black and blue people think the artificial indoor light is illuminating it. (Seth, 2018)  The theory is those who see white and gold have a “sunnier” outlook on life, more positive. 

The importance of Seth’s research is to remember each of us has an individual interpretation of the world. We should not assume others see the world the same way as we do. We all interpret what we see based on our stored memories which are a collection of experiences that shape how we view the world.

 We also know from neuroscience that there is six times more information flowing back from our thalamus (responsible for sensory interpretation) as we work to make sense of visual information that is coming in. Astoundingly this is proof that our brain is hard at work to make sense of the visual stimuli we are receiving. It is not “recording” what we see and play it back in our heads.  Instead, it is taking in the information and using rapid processing it to see if it corresponds with something we already know.  To do this is it has to recreate the neural connections that created the pre-existing memory, if it finds a relationship that makes sense, it associates the new stimulus and updates the context. 

Priming the brain for experience

Another way to understand in practice how our brain interprets and connects to existing stored memory is by looking at our eyes.  Our eyes are in continuous motion, moving on average 100 000 times a day, more than 3 times a second. If we wire a video camera to record video according to our eye movement, the result would be a jumpy, blurry, impossible to watch, mess. Why then is our sight not a jumpy, blurry, impossible mess? It is because we use the information already in our brains to create the scene and only update it with new information.

Want to test your brain and see how this works? You can recreate the famous eye movement experiment by Russian psychologist Alfred Lukyanovich Yarbus from 1967. He had people look at a painting and then asked questions about its contents. To simulate this experiment, stop reading and look at the picture below entitled “The Unexpected Visitor.”

Figure 3 source: Wikimedia Commons

Now hide the image and answer the following question:

1.       How many pictures are on the wall?

Now look back at the picture. Were you right? Probably not.  I am sure you got it very wrong. Why, because your brain was not primed to look for that information. You were primed to look at the people in the picture. The title, The Unexpected Visitor, primed your brain and focused your eye movements on the people in the room and what they are doing.

Yarbus observed the same when he tracked people’s eyes. Depending on how he primed participants’ eye movements varied. We do not look at all the information coming into our brains from visual stimuli. We must focus that attention to keep our world from being a blurry mess. But this means we also don’t see things as they are, but as our brain expects them to be or as we believe they should be. (Data Deluge, 2012)

As philosopher Herman Helmholtz said; “We remember what we perceive, and we perceive—intuitively or unconsciously--what we remember.”

Culture embeds experience

Think of the implications of how we work with other people. Upbringing, culture, education, the whole gamut of our experiences filter our world to create a unique view of the world. It is not surprising that multinational organizations have a hard time getting people to see the business in the same way.

I have struggled with this for the last 20 years as an expat living in Finland and The Czech Republic.  I often find myself asking “why on earth is this done that way here, that makes no sense?”  But what doesn’t make sense for me makes a perfect sense for those whose experience and upbringing is different than mine.

An excellent example of this came when I was giving a lecture on leadership to a group of young business students. Part of my presentation was showing pictures painted by leaders from one of my past training programs for a multinational.  One of the paintings, depicted by an Italian manager, showed himself standing behind his team as they climbed a mountain.  His idea was a leader always stands behind and supports his team.  However, a young Finnish male business student interpreted it differently.

He stopped me in the middle of my presentation and asked how that picture was representative of good leadership? He explained that a leader leads from the front. He gave the example of Russian commanders in World War II who stood behind the conscripts shooting any that retreated. He had just completed his mandatory military service, and it was easy to see what was driving his interpretation. It was well reported that the Russians forced their conscripts to fight and had orders from Lenin to shoot any who tried to retreat.  For this young Finnish man, the image of standing behind your team only brought up that story of Russian commanders in World War II.

It was not that one had a better view of leadership than the other, each had a valid interpretation and way of looking at the situations. It was the expression of the concept that was fundamentally different, shaped by their experience.

What if that Italian had been the boss of the Finnish man and tasked with explaining his “leadership philosophy” to him?  How do you think the Finn would view his boss?  Do you start to understand the difficulties and why we struggle to work across cultures?  Let me provide a business example that highlights the costs beyond failed relations.

A multinational client I worked for in 2008 had undertaken to open a new factory in mainland China for manufacturing their industrial products. They proceeded to clone the manufacturing plant they had in Northern Europe, which was known for producing high-quality products. They built the factory and started manufacturing.  From the first month of production quality problems appeared at an alarming rate.  Surprised and perplexed they could not understand how this plant could have so drastically inferior quality to the plant in Europe.  The processes and workflow were identical.

The problem was not in the factory design but in the minds of those that worked there. It was explained quite clearly to me a couple of years later by a Chinese manager from the same company who was a participant in one of my leadership programs. He said, for the Chinese, quality is not about over-engineering a product, that is a waste of time and money. Products should meet the minimum level needed for their function. It was how their brains, filtered through their experience, told them to define and interpret quality.

For the company, it meant spending time educating and “rewiring” the brains of the Chinese workers to create a new reality for the workers, one that matched the expectations of their customers. This problem is not limited to this one company. It is an ongoing problem in China. It is, of course, better to understand this brain limitation before the products start rolling off the assembly line than to try to correct it later.

Training yourself to be situationally aware

The examples above all seem obvious in hindsight but when in the situation it is more difficult to understand the forces at work that are preventing you from success.  But if you train your brain and heighten your awareness of your surroundings, force your brain to process at a higher level those surroundings, that awareness will give you a prediction of a likely future and provide a better indication of how you should act.

The term situational awareness originally was used by aviators and was identified in combat aviation situations as one of the decisive factors to a positive outcome.  (Watts, 1996)  The elements of situational awareness consist of perception, comprehension, and projection.  Together these three factors provide us with a full view of situations and help to guide us in better decision making.

Perception and comprehension are how we become aware of the environment and understand the information coming into our brains.  To be fully aware of the situation it is essential to have a high degree of familiarity with the system you are using, put aside assumptions, and keep your mind constantly alert for changes. 

To get to this level of understanding, you must fight against your brain which is attempting to take shortcuts and apply mental rules that don’t always provide you with an accurate, current picture of what you are currently experiencing.

The third part, projection, is the ability to project into the future what will happen based on an evaluation of the information received.  Being able to anticipate the future and apply reason to direct actions towards outcomes that support us in orchestrating a higher level of success is what we want to achieve.

To become more situationally aware, you need to train and build your experience.  It takes a minimum of 2 760 hours of training before a military pilot gets into the cockpit of a fighter plane and another 1 to 2 years of intense training before they are fully competent to enter combat.  That is a lot of hours, and most of it is spent in simulation building “artificial experience.”

Most professions do not spend nearly as much time in practice before putting people to work.  Most of us are not involved in life or death situations daily, and therefore it can be argued that we don’t need as high a level of situational awareness.   But I would say that when we don’t engage in any training, and experience building before we jump in and start doing, the possibilities for wrongly assessing situations multiplies quickly.  We end up learning by doing and from our mistakes, the school of “hard knocks.”

We cannot expect that our minds can develop the level of sophistication necessary to understand our limitations in assessing situations, nor how to bypass those limitations to make better decisions, without training.  Just as a fighter pilot must train to develop their skills to a level where they can direct a strike force, destroy enemy radar, monitor surface-to-air missiles and track enemy aircraft all while flying at 700 feet per second, you must train to develop your own situational awareness to be able to function at a higher level.

Using artificial experience to build your situational awareness

For over 20 years I have been involved in coaching and training people by using artificial experience building methods with the goal of building the database of experiences that they can reference to have a higher level of situational awareness.  What I do with my clients is to put them through highly challenging and realistic artificially created experiences. 

The background to the method that I developed in my programs came from the US military.  When I was just out of college in 1988 I moved to Washington D.C. and worked at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States in records declassification.  I spent my days reading top-secret classified materials and deciding if they could be recommended for declassification.  One of the ideas I came across in that work was a method for training battlefield commanders called “artificial experience building.”  The way it worked was commanders were put in elaborate simulations on the battlefield and required to make decisions.  Those decisions evaluated, and feedback provided.  The military psychologists determined that this was highly effective for building combat experience artificially, in a safe environment.  Research has found that artificial experience is as valid as real-life experience, therefore when we have new experiences, even if they are artificial, the brain will use that artificially embed experience to evaluate new information.

We use roleplay to create characters and situations that are steeped in emotion and unexpected challenges, purposely raising the stress level and often activating to some degree the flight or fight stressors that lead to poor decisions.  After the roleplay has been completed, we take time to evaluate how the situation was approached and what could be improved on.  We often then allow the person to “replay” the experience incorporating the feedback, which provides for better internalization of the behavior change needed to have greater success in the situation.

As neuroscientist Gretchen Schmelzer explains, for events to make a lasting change, information must be moved from short-term memory to long-term memory.  There are three ways to accomplish this: urgency, repetition, and association.  (Schmelzer, 2015)

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