Perception — Not What You Think

There is a difference between what your senses experience (raw perception) and what you understand and experience in the mind.

Your perception is the direct sense contact with the physical world of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Your understanding of that experience is the mental result of the interaction between your direct experience of the world, how your mind interprets those inputs, and what the mind infers from that interpretation.

Here is a quote from the NPR program Short Wave where reporter Emily Kwong speaks with behavioral and data scientist Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias.

The human brain can process 11 million bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. So, our brains sometimes take cognitive shortcuts that can lead to unconscious or implicit bias, with serious consequences for how we perceive and act toward other people.

Agarwal tells us that these cognitive shortcuts result in “unconscious bias.” These shortcuts are actually necessary for the brain to make sense of the world in real time. Otherwise we would just be overwhelmed by the amount of data flooding into the brain. However, these shortcuts create patterns of perception that tend to recur again and again, even with experiences that are not the same as the ones that created the original pattern.

How does this affect our daily life? If these patterns become habits of response, then we will tend to respond in the same way to similar situations over and over again, rather than responding with more skillful and appropriate actions relevant to each new moment of experience.

Others will react to our actions with their own biases created from their own habitual patterns of perceptions, creating cycles of disappointment, confusion, and misunderstanding that will tend to create more suffering in our life and the lives of others.

We can only break this cycle of continued suffering by bringing mindful awareness to what arises in our mind and becoming aware of when we are reacting from these patterns of unconscious bias. This broader awareness can allow us to see that we do not need to constantly identify with our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting. We can create the space for a new, more skillful response that will weaken the habitual pattern and be of benefit both to ourselves and to those we interact with in our lives.