The Power of Perspective
Each one of us gets up every morning. As the sun peaks over the horizon, most of us start to open our eyes. As we fall faster and faster out of dream and more and more into reality, our perspective takes over.
Every single bit of our experience is intrinsic only to one person, one brain, one moment, one perspective. It is the categorical differentiator that no one can deny us (yet). With this “gift”, if you’re inclined to call it that, we can explore the world around us.
The world doesn’t happen around us simply to be observed, but on that same token, from your perspective the world you see exists in that way only to you. It is, in a sense, your own world. Standing in an open meadow before a wonderful vista may be a beautiful picturesque scene to one of us. To another, however, the meadow may be a collection of interesting flowers and grasses with relationships between insects both on the ground and in the air. Another person may see the action of the clouds, the effect of wind, and the atmospheric and scientific effects in the immediate area.
What some fail to realize after hearing all these perspectives is that they can exist in the same moment. The world gives us no clue as to who is looking upon it and how; that is the beauty of our ability to perceive it.
Back to the notion of waking up in the morning. As you wake up, your brain starts to fill with the stresses of the day. The tasks that must be accomplished; the people that you need to see and the things you ultimately need to do in order to feel productive. As important as a task may be, as life threatening or menial, it is still only one perspective.
Millions are opening their eyes during that same moment, millions of brains start to fill with thoughts, stresses, pleasures and worries. As the day draws on, we start to mingle with these millions of people. We drive past them, we wait in line with them, we curse at them and we help them.
But do we ever take the time to really understand the power of their perspective? How many of us take the gravity of an experience and suddenly comprehend the weight of that gravity multiplied by the amount of people feeling it? It is almost masochistic to acknowledge such a thought.
So what does it mean when we realize the magnitude of perspective? Most choose to glorify it and romanticize the very notion of such a thing as perspective being experienced by so many people. I, however, tend to take another route…
Perspective is the result of a biological adaptation we call consciousness. A simple (lucky) byproduct of the advanced state of our minds. In order to collect and arrange both working memory and long term memory one must have a active workspace. Toss in the demands of give senses running in tandem and you need a profoundly adaptive and quick way of putting all this info together. The consciousness as we understand it is simply the part of this mechanism that we are actively aware of.
Because of this biological underpinning we all must have some rather reproducible characteristics. Turns out, we all tend to think in similar fashions, we feel pain in predictable ways, we associate thoughts in more or less the same way, and we use symbolic languages in the same way. However, there is that tiny detail of psychology.
On top of the predictable biological underpinnings are the advanced higher brain functions. Things like emotion that cannot be directly measured or stimulated (yet). However, thankfully, we all tend to have similar psychological reactions.
In the end it all boils down to stimulus and response. If you can isolate enough variables any question can be answered on the foundation of what you find out from stimulus and response events. If I say (or do) this, in this way, in this context, with this intent, to this type of person, and with this kind of mindset, what happens? What happens when I do it 10 times, with 100 different types of variables? Patterns emerge.
If you isolate the right variable, thebiological underpinnings of consciousness influences psychology in such a way that it can be observed and analyzed to understand the patterns at play.
Suddenly this “gift” of perspective born from our consciousness is not so magical and whimsical. Once you understand how biology effects psychology and then learn to understand how that psychology manifests itself, you are digging down one step closer to pulling apart the nature of the being. Prior I talked about the societally imposed layer, this is the converse; the biologically imposed foundation.
The final step in analysis is creating your own stimulus and sending it into a situation in order to trace the reactions it causes. Through this technique one can watch how that stimulus is experienced, analyzed and then reacted to in the person / people you’re with. After you’ve built a theory of the person, it’s the last step in proofing your theory. But this technique is for later.
