You are, at this exact moment, likely, categorically convinced that you are observing an authentic image of the world directly in front of your very eyes and no one can tell you differently. Despite these extremely crisp and vivid depictions, the unnerving reality is that your objective ability to detect changes and to truly “see” is actually more akin to having a gunny sack over your head with one eye gazing out from a very small hole. And what you can make out, from your limited vantage point may not, in fact, actually even be there.
BEFORE WE BEGIN: MAGIC DEFINED
Fundamentally, Fates on Fire is about taking a unique approach with the mission of “exploring the magic of financial independence.” I get that some consider this, perhaps, a bit esoteric and I have been questioned about the use and meaning of the word, “magic,” so I figured I take a moment to clarify.
To be certain, we are not referring to fictional magic as might be encountered in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” or Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books, nor are we referring to the illusory magic as demonstrated by such dazzling masters as Houdini or Penn & Teller. And we are absolutely not referring to supernatural magic like the alchemists of the medieval ages or scholars with arcane spells and incantations attempting to call forth eldritch horrors from beyond time and space. Nope, we’re not talking about any of that.
What we are talking about is real magic – Twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks, the aurora borealis, creating something from nothing, ideas that change others and change the world, love, and innovation. These are examples of the kind of magic we see and encounter everyday, but likely don’t recognize. But, why is that?
SIGHTED BLINDNESS
To better understand our inability to objectively experience life, let’s dip our toe into the discipline of neuropsychology – the field of understanding brain function and its influence on cognition and behavior. Specifically, let’s focus on the concept of inattentional blindness – or “the pervasive misperception of our own perception.” Initially studied by Arien Mack & Irvin Rock, inattentional blindness, is the unavoidable human condition of being unable to see what is right in front of your eyes simply as a result of being focused on other stimuli (aka, not paying attention). A widely cited example is driving whilst having a wonderful, hands-free phone conversation and then inadvertently slamming in to the giant, neon yellow SUV directly in front of you. Another astounding and famous example is this video where people are so focused on counting the number of basketball passes, they completely fail to observe the person standing around wearing a gorilla suit.
While a bit hyperbolic to be certain, we are all subject to horrific amounts of inattention blindness; it’s simply a function of our hardwired neuropsychology. The sad, but unfortunate result is that we are unable to see things even when they occur directly in front of our face. And to further complicate matters, we are completely blind to our inattentional blindness.
CLEARLY SEEING WHAT IS NOT THERE
Aside from the “hiding in plain sight” effect of inattentional blindness, there are other confounding perceptual and cognitive processes we are subject to every waking moment that cause us to see things that are not even there. The most intriguing and sinister of which is is called amodal completion. At its essence, amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of vision, it is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see: When we see a cat behind a picket fence, our perceptual system represents those parts of the cat that are occluded by the picket fence. To better illustrate visually, here are a few images that do a nice job of demonstrating the concept of amodal completion.
Lest I neglect to mention, amodal completion is not exclusive to visual stimuli, but also produces the same results with touch, auditory, olfactory and mental imagining. Pretty wild, eh?
MAGIC TO TRANSCEND OUR GRAND ILLUSION
The challenge is that much of our ability to see and appreciate something is determined on whether our minds are prepared to discern its intricacies. Basically, “when confronted by a phenomenon for which we are ill-prepared, we often simply fail to see it, though we may be looking directly at it.”
While inattentional blindness and amodal completion are just two of many types of eerie perceptual and cognitive limitations, the larger point here is that they suggest that humans are strongly predisposed to make many unjustified, often unspoken, simplifying assumptions about nature and experience. In essence, a consistent and abject failure of metacognition.
However, as physicist, J.P. Crutchfield states, “There is a tendency, whose laws we dimly comprehend, for natural systems to balance order and chaos, to move to the interface between predictability and uncertainty. The result is increased complexity,” or, as I prefer to call it, magic.
A MAGICAL SOLUTION TO BECOMING RICH
It is this very magic we can leverage to realize and overcome, albeit briefly, our own perceptual and cognitive weaknesses to transcend our illusions to see more clearly, both the things that are and are not there. That the adverse impact of our limitations are varied and significant we are certain. Whether it’s failing to see the “fairy” sitting on the branch in London’s Notting Hill (above) or making an irrational decision based on mental amodal completion to sell all of your equities at the bottom of the stock market in 2009, both are very real. These are only two examples that illustrate relatively benign aesthetic and catastrophic financial implications.
The astonishingly easy, magic and, yet, frustrating answer is to simply pay attention. More precisely, it means a constant struggle to become unblind from our blindness, to be aware that we miss most things we believe we see, and to concede how we may see things that are not actually there. It means, recognizing our limitations and transcending the unjustified, simplified and outright fabricated assumptions we make about the world and our experience within it.
As cognitive psychologist, Gustav Kuhn, states as part of his experiement on attention and misdirection, “Prior information about its nature significantly improves detection. Informed participants fixated closer to and detected the event than participants who missed it. This result is consistent with the notion that attention is allocated ahead of the current locus of fixation”
While Kuhn’s experiment is super-awesome and absolutely worth reading, I actually believe poet W.B. Yeats said the same thing a bit more eloquently, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” And it is by seeing these magic things more clearly and more consistently that we truly become rich; where we can near the sublime.
WHAT’S NEXT?
I’d love to hear your comments on this post and, specifically, to hear any stories about how your perceptual/cognitive limitations have impacted your life, either for the good, bad or confounding.