You may have heard of the infamous dead zone in your eye called the "blind spot." It's where the optic nerve attaches to the back of the retina, and in that particular spot, you have no rods or cones, which are the sensors that capture images to send to the brain.
You are truly blind almost in the center of your vision. In both eyes.
Yet, you don't notice the big swatch of nothing in your vision. Your brain is wired to fill in that dead space with whatever makes the most sense in the context of the rest of the image.
If you swing your gaze, with one eye shut, around the area in which you sit, as fast as you can - high and low, up and down - there was nary a gap, was there? Not once. That is how lightning fast your brain is to fill in that space. It's quite remarkable to think about it. But please make note of one thing:
You didn't have any sense of the effort or even of the absence of information. Your brain, not your eye, filled in that space so quickly and so well that you weren't conscious of it. It takes concerted effort to discover that you have a blind spot, so well-concealed is it from our awareness.
You are hard-wired to fill in the gaps of your world, and most of the time, it's unnoticeable to you. You "see" what isn't truly there every moment of your life. Your blind spot is invisibly always with you.
Most of us don't deal well with not knowing, and knowing something is better than knowing nothing - even if it's a fake something that we pretend to know. It gives us a framework on which to make a decision and allows us to respond. Everyone does this. It's normal and natural.
It's also a complete fabrication, rendered out of whole cloth.
Instead of seeing what is happening, you can easily convince yourself that you "see" what is not happening. It's not reality, but you don't know that, and you sometimes make decisions based upon a mirage.
The best decisions are always based upon the indisputable fact. The truth. What is.
If I could gently urge you, I recommend that you crave the indisputable fact and fight hard to see it. This is for your own good. Don't pretend to know what you don't or cannot know.
That requires patience and embracing the fact that you truly do not know.
Whether it's some horrific event such as the crash in DC, or your friend is fifteen minutes late to a long-scheduled lunch, know this:
In the absence of knowing, we have a tendency to make things up. And what we make up is generally negative.
Don't pretend to know what you don't know. Because you truly don't know. You have blind spots, and that's okay. Waiting for the facts to emerge is always smart.
8 Comments
Good word!!!
True
Spot on! Worthy of serious internal reflection.
Well said. Insightful.
great point, I am reminded of a visual test done at the Command Course in recruiting. Its a film of kids bouncing white and black balls to each other and you are instructed to count the number of passes of one color of ball. the movie then goes for several minutes and at the conclusion a class full of college educated officers are asked how many passes. in our class of maybe 30 peeps you have as many different answers and then the instructor asks who saw the gorilla. Almost all the class is bewildered by the question and maybe one will be like, yep I saw it. The instructor then replays the film where quite obviously a dude in a gorilla suit walks right through where they were bouncing balls. It supports the point here that you often only see what you are looking for even when it is incontestable that other information and details were there as well, but had you asked any of those officers without replaying the film, even I would have sworn there was absolutely no gorilla.
Great story, Dennis. In the training I offer, I use something similar from Penn and Teller involving a gorilla.
You don't know what you don't know until you can fill in the gaps. One of my blind spots has been a lack of understanding of how we went from a constitution that was to chain our federal government to a federal government that is virtually unlimited in its power. Understanding how that has happened has been a real eye-opener for me. I had no idea how blind I was. Now, the idea is to recapture what was lost and that's not going to happen without a fight.
Brett this is very interesting.
Thank you for the post.
One must be able to discern fact from what your brain is processing.
Waiting for the facts rather that spread false narratives is the most positive thing one can do.