Becoming perceptive

This is the second part of an essay series that began with “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process.” It can be read on its own.

Becoming perceptive

Detail from The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan Van Eyck, 1434

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I went out to see what I could see . . .
—Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

When Abraham Maslow did clinical studies of people who self-actualized, one thing that set them apart from others was, he wrote, that they lived “more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.” They were, to put it simply, more perceptive.

They were perceptive about their emotions—more attuned to what they felt than others, and less prone to intellectualized introspection. They were perceptive of external reality—more receptive to what was going on, and less caught up in fictions about how the world works. 

They were even superior at looking at art. When Maslow showed his subjects paintings, people who struggled to self-actualize would typically label what they saw (“It is a Picasso”) whereas the self-actualized would describe the concrete details of the painting they had before them (“There is an interesting tension between the yellows and the blues here”).

These observations are qualitative and hard to define and measure precisely, but they seem reasonable? Self-actualization means, at least partly, that you have designed a life that fits you, that allows you to express your human potential. And, as I talked about in the last part, to make a good design, to find a fit, you need to perceive the context you are designing for clearly.

If you are confused about your feelings, or in denial about how the world works, or unable to read others, it will be harder to self-actualize. If you are too constrained by what you think is going on to notice what is actually going on, you will miss important data that would allow you to make better choices.

Perception is a controlled hallucination

Perceptiveness is not (only) about seeing more. Someone who has long experience in a field will see more than a novice because they have built up a richer mental model of the situation which allows them to make finer distinctions and notice subtle patterns. But they are not necessarily more perceptive. To be perceptive you also need to be able to see through—that is, see through your mental models and notice things about the underlying reality that your model cannot explain.

Perception is a controlled hallucination.¹ When you perceive the world, you do not simply see what is in front of you. Instead, your brain predicts what you will see. You hallucinate reality. But the hallucination is controlled, because the prediction is measured against the input you receive from your eyes and your ears and if it is too far off, the prediction error is registered and the “hallucination” is updated to minimize the error.

But, and this is the important point: if the prediction error is small, your brain will filter it. When this happens—when reality seems predictable to you, like what you see is what you expected to see—what you perceive is mostly your predictive model, not reality.

When I moved to Denmark, this became obvious to me in a visceral way. I only understood a few words of spoken Danish, but I could wing it. I remember a journalist came up to me at a party and made a series of unintelligible noises that ended with, “. . . P.O. Enquist?” Ah, he wants to know if I have read Enquist, I thought. Enquist is a Swedish writer. Having this shared context made it easier for me to follow the rest of the conversation: “kompliceret . . . Gud”—we were talking about Enquist’s complicated relationship to God; “Herrnhutiske”—the pietistic churches in the marshlands of 1930s Northern Sweden. In halting Danish, I spoke about Enquist’s childhood church’s near sexual fascination with the open wounds of Christ. Finally a proper conversation in Danish!

Then the journalist mentioned, in passing, that Enquist’s father had been a TV preacher—which didn’t make sense at all. Enquist’s father was a woodcutter. When I pointed this out, the journalist looked at me with a quizzical face. We switched over to English, and I realized that he hadn’t been talking about Enquist at all. He had been talking about an American country singer he had interviewed. The entire conversation I thought we’d had—it had been a hallucination.

How large can the gap between model and reality be before you register a prediction error? It depends. Some people have brains that are more prone to register subtle prediction errors. My wife Johanna is like this. She almost never fooled herself that she understood what people said when we moved to Denmark; she was just appropriately bewildered. She’s also better at spotting errors in an argument or noticing subtle emotional cues, and sometimes she can’t look at my face when we talk because she gets overwhelmed by all of the information. I am less perceptive by nature.

But how sensitive you are to prediction errors can, to some extent, be adjusted. Depending on context, experience, and state of mind, the brain (seems to) adjust how willing it is to filter reality vs register what you actually see.

Paths to perceptiveness

One thing that is helpful for me is to explicitly assume that I am wrong about what is going on. If I tell myself, “There is something you don’t understand here, Henrik. Figure out what it is,” then I can summon a playful paranoia and the subtle details that confuse me, and which I would otherwise be prone to discard, jump out at me, like footprints of blood in the snow. I start asking questions about word choices that seem off to me, or strange pauses, or things said with surprising emotion. This way, I can bring out more and more of the data that confuse me, until my mental model “breaks down.” When this happens, I feel confused and alert.

I suspect some people feel uncomfortable asking stupid questions like this because it makes them sound slow-witted—but that is only at first; after a few minutes, people who ask stupid questions tend to sound sharp. They notice things others have missed.

People who develop high perceptiveness have typically engaged in some activity that has put them in a tight feedback loop with reality. Johanna, for example, spent a lot of time drawing around the time we met. When you draw, you externalize your mental model of how something looks, and this forces you to admit that you don’t know what a tree looks like, or a hand, or a face. It helps you look closer. But there are many ways to create such feedback loops:

• by articulating what you think in writing in a systematic way;

• by making it a habit to tell people what you interpret them as saying so they can let you know if you’ve understood;

• by writing down your predictions of how things will turn out and looking at the predictions after the fact;

• by engaging in a serious project that forces you to try things and get feedback from reality: running a startup, doing proper science, playing games competitively.

That a portrait painter gets better at seeing faces and a scientist better at seeing the thing they study is unsurprising, but do they get more perceptive overall? Probably a little bit. They at the very least learn to appreciate how hard it is to see what is really going on.

Another thing to consider when trying to become perceptive is that the way you learn in school—where the material is sequenced in a curriculum so that you are first exposed to simple examples and later to more complex ones—tends to make you less perceptive. Following a curriculum, you build mental models by processing simple examples, and then those simple models filter reality so that you become blind to the subtleties of the more complex examples. This is sometimes called a knowledge shield.

To avoid knowledge shields the US military, when it does accelerated training programs, avoids sequential curriculums and instead exposes soldiers to complex simulations and case studies that overwhelm them. The unpredictable, messy nature of the input makes it hard for the soldiers to form stable and coherent mental models, so they filter less input and develop a more well-calibrated ability to pattern match. Learning this way is frustrating, and you get none of that comforting feeling of progress that a curriculum provides—but it is faster, and it makes you more perceptive. The easiest way to do this is to jump in at the adult side of the pool and learn new skills by working on real-world projects.

So what we see is that self-actualization is a flywheel: you become self-actualized by seeing reality clearly so you can design a life that fits you, and you become better at seeing reality by engaging with it head-on.

If you liked this, you can read the first part here. There are also a few other, older pieces that are relevant: “How to think in writing”, “Being patient with problems”, and “Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born.”

The work was funded by the paying subscribers. Thank you!

And a special thanks to Spencer Kier who did the editing on this piece.

/Henrik

1. I think this phrase—controlled hallucination—orignated with the neuroscientist Anil Seth. I’ve also seen Andy Clark use it.