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The Art of Perception: Assessing What You See, with Amy Herman, Lawyer, Art Historian, and Author, The Art of Perception
A couple of years ago, a woman in the UK purchased this dress to wear in a wedding. And for reasons still unbeknownst to me, she put it up on Facebook and she asked the question, what color is my dress? And my first reaction was, “Who cares? You bought the dress. You’re going to wear it. Why does anybody care what color it is?” But for some reason, the question and the responses went viral in the biggest way. So I took that as a clue that this is compelling people for a reason. I put the dress up in my classes. And so I asked people, “Raise your hand. If you see this dress is white and gold.” And hands go up. Then I ask who sees it as blue and black. Fewer hands go up. And then I say, “Who sees it as something else?” And there’s always that 1% that sees it as gray and brown or brown and green.
And while I don’t get into a neurological discussion of why we see colors the way we do, I’m not a neuroscientist. I’m not qualified to foray into that area. I use it as a baseline foundation to remind people, no two people see anything the same way. And while this is a dumb dress, I don’t really worry about whether you see it as white and gold or blue and black my concern is when you’re sitting in the meeting, you’re in the operating room, you’re questioning a suspect and two of you walk away with a fundamentally different perception of what you just observed. That’s my concern.
I begin with the blue dress and then I moved to an exercise where I put up a picture, it’s a photograph, and I ask the entire room to raise his or her hand. Everyone raises his or her hand. And I say, “Put your hand down when you see something definitive and unequivocal in this photograph that you could describe to someone who wasn’t looking at it.” Maybe a hand goes down, maybe two hands go down and everyone else is squinting and they’re looking. And then I say, “If your hand is still up, I’m going to tell you that what you’re looking at is a mammal.” Maybe a few other hands go down. People are squinting even more and they’re looking. And finally I say, “If your hand is still raised in the air, I’m going to tell you that the mammal you’re looking at has four legs. If you see a four legged mammal put your hand down.” Maybe a few more hands go down and people are visibly frustrated that they’re not seeing something. Then I tell everyone to put their hands down.
And then I show the slide with the outline of what they were looking at. And what you’re looking at in this slide is a picture of a cow. It’s not an optical illusion. It’s a photograph. It’s known as the Renshaw Cow. The picture was taken by a man named Dr. Samuel Renshaw who created a series of visual exercises to help Navy pilots discern enemy warfare faster in World War II. So it’s not an optical illusion. It’s a real photograph. And people can’t believe that there’s a cow, because then I go back to the original photograph. You can’t unsee what I’ve just shown you. Or as people like to say, “You can’t unring that bell.” Once you’ve been shown the cow, you can’t not see it. And the reason I use this exercise, again, at the beginning of all my sessions is to underscore the idea that no two people see anything the same way.
There are always some people in my group that see the cow immediately and they can’t understand how you can’t see it, but the majority of people don’t see it and can’t see it until they’re shown the outline. I begin with that exercise, because I did the exercise. That cow was shown to me and my friend sitting next to me, put her hand down immediately and whispered to me, “I can’t believe you don’t see this.” And then I felt even worse. This is what I do for a living. And so it’s very complex what the brain sees and doesn’t see. How do we approach the situations when two people see things very differently?