Once in a while, in the annals of medical history, a person who was nearly blind from birth has his or her sight restored by cataract or corneal surgery.  In these cases, a striking inability to “see” many of the things that we see every day plagues these patients, even after their eyes are returned to normal.  These people are reported to have particular difficulty seeing faces and the kind of depth that allows one to know how far away an object is.

Our ability to see faces was one of the first things that we developed as babies.  We spent hours examining the outside edges of our mom’s face, and  touching and staring at her eyes and mouth.  It was a lot of work over the first few months, but the payoff was huge.

By learning to recognize faces, and later on, the contours and depth of objects without touching them, we gained a valuable survival tool.  As we grew up, we could gauge someone else’s mood and participate in huge amounts of non-verbal communication.  By being able to judge the distances between objects, we learned to navigate complex environments without stepping on the cat’s tail, or slamming our head into the door.

The blind man with newly restored sight?  He never needed to learn how to decode a human face.  He used other senses to try and understand a person’s mood or reaction.  Everything he needed to know about objects and how to get around them he could discern with his other senses, especially touch.  His brain was devoted to decoding other aspects of his world- a world that had different rules than ours.

It is no surprise, then, that many of these patients were reported to be greatly distressed by their ability to see, and found it much easier to close their eyes and go back to being blind.

As Annie Dillard writes in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “The mental effort in [reasoning out what they should be able to see] proves overwhelming for many patients.  It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.  It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent.  A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.” (pp.25-26)

(see also case study and Maurice von Senden’s “Space and Sight”)

What strikes me as I learn more about our development of sight and perception is how un-concrete our world really is.  On the face of it, our world seems pretty fixed and stable, but if you give a blind man the same ability to see, he experiences it totally differently.  It is amazing to me how much of our daily lives is dependent on our brain’s ability to create recognizable patterns out of an infinite amount of complexity that surrounds us.

Our brain’s ability to decode our environment to construct a useful world is also important in psychology.  It is useful for our brain to be able to notice how other people feel about, and react to, our actions.  If I know that someone gets mad when I hit them, I can make the appropriate decision to stop.  If I mistook the expression of anger for one of pleasure, I could very quickly get into trouble.

In order to participate in society, it is critical that I am able to decode the behavior of other people around me and be able to respond in a like manner.  In fact, this is the major difficulty with the autistic spectrum disorders.  Kids with autism are often unable to read and respond to emotional and facial cues, leading to all sorts of developmental and social problems.

But this ability to perceive and draw conclusions is far from perfect.  Our brain is making huge approximations. In terms of sight, the brain takes what the eyes give it and then fill in the gaps from our memory to create an image that makes sense.

This system can lead to errors.  Some examples:  the advent of DNA testing in criminal investigations has revealed that eyewitness testimony is surprisingly unreliable; running into a pole or door that happened to be in your blind spot (”I just didn’t see it there!”); the unsettling effect of an optical illusion (see picture).

We get accustomed to what we “see” as being the absolute reality, but occasionally that system of perception breaks down because the brain made the wrong interpretation, or guess.

But while sight errors are usually benign, mis-perceptions in psychology can be devastating. As we grow up, we rely more and more on what others think about us.  As I said before, this can be useful for interacting smoothly with others.  If you can perceive expectations, then it is easier to meet them.

In fact, though, many of us start to equate what others think about us with what we think about ourselves.  Just like with sight, we don’t know that what we perceive is outside of us is sometimes false.  My belief about the identity of the criminal I saw could be just as erroneous as what I think my teacher thinks of me.

Worse, these perceptions are constantly changing.  If we go by what other people might think, we will flip-flop from “I am bad” to “I am good” many times in one day.  And when the “I am bad” conclusion is accompanied by an emotion that doesn’t feel very good (shame, embarrassment), we start changing our behavior in an attempt to be good.

What’s the problem with this?  Remember that your perception is only an approximation made by your brain in attempt to give you the best chance at survival.  If you base your sense of who you are on this approximation, you stand a good chance of being wrong.  I mean, how could it be true that you are a bad person in one context and a good one in another?  In fact, isn’t it true that you are just a person and the perception of being good or bad is just that:  a perception?

And while this flip-flopping angst is probably a pretty good summary of our teenage experience, it doesn’t make for a very high level of mental health.

In fact, it is my experience that when you feel chronically hopeless, alone, sad, irritable, or anxious it is because at some point you have come to a false conclusion about yourself based on how you think someone else felt about you.  You adopted this perception as reality, and then proceeded to live your life based on that “fact.”

The truth is that there is a level of reality that is beyond perception.  The truth is that there is a YOU that is beyond the level of perception.  This reality is not a pattern, it is not based on cause and effect, and it doesn’t ever change.  It is a reality that exists beyond judgement and beyond opposites like good and bad, or right and wrong.

If you stripped away the outside world, your rushing thoughts, and your perceived beliefs about your own value, you are left with You.  The you that is perfect; a perfection that no external perception could ever change.

What other people feel about you is useful to know, but it should never replace your own sense of who you are.  If your mood, anxiety, or chronic pain is not at the level you would like, it may be that you have subconsciously forgotten this simple fact.

What to do next is another story, but this first step is critical.  It is the recognition and acceptance of where you are and that false perceptions might be controlling your actions.

If you would like further help with identifying and letting go of the perceptions that are limiting you, please give me a call for a no-charge 15 minute consultation, or to make an appointment.