Perception

I was talking to a colleague today about perception, and just how wrong people can be when they view things with their own “personal perception” tinted glasses on.

Wikipedia describes perception as:

“…the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information”.

This suggests a simple process of seeing/feeling/smelling/touching/hearing which leads to understanding.

But then it also states:

“The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with a preconceived idea about it, they tend to take those preconceived ideas and see them whether or not they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. The extent of a person’s knowledge creates their reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that which it has been exposed to.”

So no wonder people perceive things the wrong way sometimes, and I guess that’s why people with limited views are called small minded - they literally have little in there to create a reality with.

 Moral of the tale - have lots of experiences and gain lots of knowledge so you can be a big minded person when it comes to understanding your sensory information!

This entry was posted on 10/10/2008 at 03:08 pm and is filed under Seedlings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.