I Think, Therefore I See

I Think, Therefore I See

I Think, Therefore I See

Biologists tells us that the eye does not function to replicate the world we come into contact with, but instead to sense, process and encode the motion, patterns and colors of the light we see into something our minds will interpret. Our minds interpret the data given to us by our eyes in connection with all of the other organs that respond to our environment. It combines this new data with similar information it has already stored in our memories. As a result, no two people see anything exactly alike.Now the default setting that our mind comes with, operates in much the same way. We develop patterns of thought or mental models that shape what we "see" or "perceive" and thus what we think and how we will chose to think about new information that comes our way. We persist in or hold on to thinking that connects with the mental pictures or mental models we have already formed in our mind. So as we go from scene to scene in our lives, our mind fills in the gaps between our experiences with the same old familiar thinking. It connects our thoughts and experiences in such as way as to keep them as consistent and uniform as possible with what we already think.

Call it a persistence of thought. Wesee what makes sense to us. We form a picture of ourselves and develop beliefs and opinions around what is consistent with what is already there in our heads. Anything that is inconsistent with that image or contrary to our current ideas or thinking, seems to go unnoticed or is consciously ignored, so that we may maintain that continuous, uninterrupted picture of our world.Just as what we see is governed by what we think, so what we perceive as realour feelings, thoughts and assumptionsis based on what wethink is real. It sounds obvious but for leaders, it has far-reaching, often overlooked, implications.Our mind is constantly trying to make sense of our world. We pull in dissimilar information and our mind tries to connect it with what we already know. To facilitate this process, we create mental models that filter everything we experience.

International consultant and author Luc de Brabandere reminds us in his bookThe Forgotten Half of Change, "It is not a question of intelligence, but rather one of our perception of the world around us.... We see and hear things in a variable way, and certainly differently from one another, because only the hardware is common to all of us. We can even become blind or deaf when confronted with some situations that will be glaringly or blaringly evident to others. It is therefore hardly surprising that, from time to time, we do get stuck." Stuck in the same old thinking.

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