Perception is the Only Thing that Matters… Depending on How You Look at It

I repeatedly am fascinated by the way people can look at the same object or situation and see entirely different things. At the university, for example, we have an old cliché that always brings a smile to my face: if you have three professors in the room, you'll have at last four different opinions.

The notion of “what you see is what is” comes from the concept of perception. In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. (And for those deeply interested in perception, you would enjoy looking at those philosophies associated with Phenomenology – the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.)

In my recently published pop psych book, Mom and Dad’s Pearls of Wisdom… You Gotta Love ’Em, there is a vignette titled, “Perception.” In it I tell of an experience I had sitting at a biker bar, talking with a woman whose name was Alison. She and I were sitting at an outside table, sipping cold beers in the warm sun, appreciating the variety of motorcycles in the parking lot. To wit, I said to her, “These bikes are so different from each other. And assuming that every bike owner likes how his or her bike looks, I guess there’s a lot of truth to the cliché ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’”
At that moment, a bike pulled up whose owner announced proudly to some people he knew, “She’s new—just got her last week. Isn’t she beautiful?”
A minute later, a man sitting behind us said to his girlfriend, discreetly yet loud enough for us to hear, “I wouldn’t want that bike if you gave it to me.”
Alison and I heard him but were careful not to acknowledge our awareness of the comment. Then, out of the corner of her mouth, Alison murmured, “I love my father’s Vince Lombardi like quote:

Perception isn’t everything;
it’s the only thing.

So, what do you think of that?

Bill