Perception Test – Don’t Believe What You See

If you’re not one of the 20 million or so people who have taken the ‘Awareness Test’, it’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time…

As you can see, you can’t always trust your brain. It doesn’t give us an accurate image of what’s out in the world… it can’t really. There’s so much information pouring in from our all our senses, of course our brains have to make executive decisions on what to focus on and filter.

But our brain doesn’t just filter. It interprets.

It takes all those years of walking around on this planet and tries to stuff new information into the mental models we’ve created… and we have a whole bunch of those – whether it’s our implicit understanding of how gravity works or the nature of light and shadows.

Our brains make assumptions, adjustments and giant leaps of interpretations. So we can’t trust our brains. Or, more accurately, we can trust them to continue interpreting and twisting the world around us so it can fit into our expectations.
That alone should motivate us to take a moment and question what we see. To be open to alternative inputs and try to think outside of current mental models.

Easier said then done, but stay tuned to this blog for some practical ideas on how. 

This article was first published on 11th September 2016 on Learn2Learn Blog here.