The Remarkable

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I was just sitting here, thinking about Mother's day the other week and the talk about how "EVERYDAY should be mother's/father's/children's day" and I reflected that the thing we really crave is something -anything- outstanding. We should value all people everyday, yes, but aren't humans kind of "set up" to forget how special the little things that happen or that we experience often, are? I think we've spoken about Schemas before, the psychological theory that says people use these mind markers I'll call them, to classify and make sense of the world. A Schema is a helpful thing because it means that your mind has stored away images for different scenarios, shapes and colours. You don't have to ask each time you see a square "What is that?" because your brain has developed a square schema, and you know one when you see it. The problem with having rigid schemas though, is that you might mistake a description of a parallelogram for a square. Are all sides even? Yes. Are there four sides? Yes. . . It's a SQUARE! In this case you've missed something really remarkable, because you thought you had asked sufficient questions to make an assessment. You thought you had all the information, but you didn't ask about the angles of that particular shape.

In the video I've embedded, author Chimamanda Adiche gives a really interesting talk about "The single story" as a biased position that people fall into, where they assume full understanding of something or someone based on one story. She begins with herself, relating her own false perception of a boy who worked in her childhood home, and then tells another story of how she was received as an unfortunate "African" in America. Neither the young house boy, Fidé nor the author herself would have any opportunity to be remarkable under the single story which was imposed on them. For Fidé, he was to be "a poor boy from a poor family," and for Adiche, it was to be a "less fortunate, foreign, 'African'." I think that this is a normal pattern in which we all fall guilty. Sometimes we don't even know what we don't know.

My challenge for you for the week is to find the remarkable story in the seemingly familiar, and known. Today I did that at church, and made friends with people I had interacted with there for over a year. I said to them "You know, I feel very disconnected here" and they said "You know what, Jane? We do too!" we switched numbers and agreed to do something about it. It's funny, because just earlier in the service, as I sat alone, I contemplated leaving the church. I said I'd been going there for more than a year, and I am not much more connected now than I was when I first came. It was then I challenged myself to get more involved, to see if I really had enough information to make a judgement about the whole experience. Was it the stimulus? Or was it me?

Let me give you one more example before I go. I often go to psychology conferences wherever I find myself. When I lived in London, I went to a conference where they told a large audience to watch a video and count the number of passes the people made. It was a reproduction of a study first done by Simons and Chabris on selective attention. See if you can accurately count the number of bounces the players make. (Don't cheat!)

Did you see the Gorilla? The first time I did that, I was literally shocked to see a playback with a Gorilla suited person pounding their chest in the middle of the players, and I had missed it in its entirety. I think sometimes we encounter life with this same selective attention, so focused on a task or what we think we're supposed to be looking for, that we fail to see the remarkable.