Sight

We just celebrated the festival of lights in India and we are about to encounter blinding, foggy early mornings. So, today, let’s talk about what role does sight play in influencing the human decision-making process.

“Beauty is more popular than virtues because it is more visible than virtues.”
― Amit Kalantri

In the last article, we talked about senses, and how the human sense system, along with a few additional nudges, drive sattention that we pay. Today, I’ve picked one particular sense out of all the available alternatives (because, why not?), which is the sense of sight. Our ability to see is one of the guiding forces for the decision-making processes we undertake, which many a times, ensure our survivals. “Seeing is believing”, I am sure we’ve heard this more than a couple of times throughout our lives. However, as per my experiences, being a drifter through time and space, I’ve come to look at sight in a two-fold fashion. I’ll dive into both of these folds as we go on with this article.

Eyesight

This is the real sight. This is everything we see, or don’t see.

“Don’t see? Vibhu, I see everything!”

Well sir, let me demonstrate otherwise. I’m not sure how many of us are aware that we can always see our noses. Our mind just chooses to ignore it. I can tell every reader at this very moment is seeing their nose with great intent and utter awe.

Another interesting fact is our state of mind greatly influences our ability to see. “The happier we are, the less we see.”. I’m sure this is a known fact, but there is a logic behind this. Let’s start with the basics. What causes happiness? One of the reasons is contentment. Contentment or satisfaction is experienced when our demands or requirements are met. Humans are incredibly selfish beings. As soon as their purposes are served, they cease to see the utility of something that used to be so near and dear to their hearts (The reason I’m writing all of this in third person is, if I write it in first person, I get included in the list of selfish beings, and I’d like to think that I’m not selfish, while selfishly protecting my image).

Therefore, at a time when we are contented, we don’t feel the need to be on guard or as observant and hence at times miss out on crucial details that are minute, yet visible.

“Mind” sight

At some point in our lives, we’ve heard or experienced something called “the mind’s eye”. For those of us who haven’t, let me illustrate this with a little exercise. Let’s close our eyes, and think about a playground; the green grass, the trees surrounding the walkway, the swings, the flowers, the colors, the smell, everything is just there as soon as we sow the seed of a playground in our brains. Now to highlight the interesting facet here, we weren’t actually seeing anything our eyes now, were we? It was all inside our hat-racks.

This was only one small illustration of how the mind’s eye works. However, it plays many other roles in our lives which we fail to register due to the whole process being largely automated. One simple example for this is our abilities to understand. If we closely observe, whenever we understand something new, we try to relate it to whatever is existent in our memories, and most of the memories that we have are visual in nature! Remember the time that our geometry teacher taught us about shapes. The next time we heard the word “square”, we automatically had the shape of a square in our mind.

The interesting thing about the mind’s eye is that it is stimulated not by our senses, but also our memories. It’s safe to say that we see only what we want to see. There is a reason that a few people are believed to be culprits of acts that they may not have committed based on their somethings they might have done in the past.

Inference

There is one simple inference that can be drawn from the two notes mentioned above, which is, the two “sights” are interrelated. One of the sights can easily influence the other, which can cause efficiency as well as faltering. It’s up to us to choose what is influenced and what is it influenced by. If we choose to let our sights be bias-free, we might be able to become better decision makers and more successful in our lives. If we choose to let our sights be easily influenced by stimulus that may impact the sound decision-making process, well, there won’t be any reduction in the number of negative incidents that we “see”(pun intended) in our everyday lives.

As we draw closer to the end, I have a daunting question in mind and I am hoping for someone to answer it. We just read a little about how sight is an important factor in decision-making. The question I have is, how can a system based on law (considered blind) base itself on “eye” witnesses?