“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”
-Daniel Gilbert (2006, p. 85)

There’s an old oriental tale about a king who sends out 3 blind servants to find an elephant and report back to him describing exactly what an elephant is. The first servant goes out, and upon locating what others tell him is an elephant, explores its trunk. He reports back to the king, telling him that without a doubt, an elephant is a creature like a snake. The second servant, upon having the townspeople point him to the elephant, spends his time examining the tusks. He reports back to the king, explaining that an elephant is merely a land-dwelling Walrus. The third servant finds the elephant and examines its thick, sturdy legs and grainy skin. He reports back to the king, saying that an elephant is surely akin to a moving tree.

This story illustrates the principle of perception; that how we view the world is dependant upon the limitations of our own personal experience and particular viewpoint. The elephant tale may seem cute and impractical, but it illustrates a concept that is very true to everyday life: we never see the whole picture. All we ever get are glimpses of the world around us, yet we proceed as if these glimpses represent a complete and universal truth. The moral of the story is that we’re all like the king’s blind men, seeing our own unique piece of the puzzle and then foolishly presuming we have the full picture.

Here’s a true tale: A pigmy who had never been out of the forest, and thus had never experienced depth-perception related to faraway things, showed a similar handicap. Seeing a herd of buffalo off in the distance, he asked his guide what kind of insects they were. The man burst into hysterical laughter when the guide tried to tell him that those “insects” were in fact big, massive buffalo viewed from afar. Because of his limited experiences, his mind couldn’t reconcile with the idea that what appeared so small in his field of vision could in fact be very large things observed at a distance. (Turnbull, 1961, p. 222) We may not be blind, and most of us would never mistake a herd of buffalo for insects, yet for each and every one of us our world is being distorted on a regular basis in different but equally powerful ways.

Perception, or our view of the world, is derived from two distinct paths of input. There is the information we take in, which we’ll continue to call perception. The second path is perspective, or what our brains proceed to do with the information that is taken in. Each avenue is influenced by a multitude of factors that bend and shape our resulting thoughts about any given situation.

Influences on perception:

• Our point of view
• Attention (what we choose to focus on)
• What we know (and don’t know) about a given situation
• Sensory input; what we see, hear, touch, taste & smell

Influences on perspective:

• Our past experiences
• Our particular beliefs
• Our culture and its influences
• Our upbringing
• Our race and sex
• The depth of knowledge we hold about a particular subject
• Our age

This material is an excerpt from the eBook The Resilient Mind. Get the full book packed with tons of other helpful psychology information for just $7.99. All proceeds from your purchase go to help kids in need!