In life rarely does a day pass without someone judging us — sometimes harshly. Of course, we do return the compliment. And life goes on as we get used to this often exhausting process of judging and getting judged. We firmly believe, at least when it concerns our opinions, that we are dealing with the truth. I am using the words judgement and opinion loosely here.
So, when we are at the receiving end of adverse opinions, it’s very difficult to pay heed to sagely advice that says don’t bother too much about what people think of you. Such a thought only makes people angrier, perhaps because it also severely discounts their opinions.
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But this is indeed a sound piece of advice, and not airy-fairy self-help stuff, as I found out many years back reading neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind . Dr. Ramachandran studies patients with neurological disorders to understand, in short, why we are what we are and why we do what we do.
There is one particular image from that book which I remember well. It is of two same-sized circles, one surrounded by bigger circles and the other surrounded by tinier circles. When I first saw the two circles, they did not look the same size. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one. As Dr. Ramachandran put it in the book, “To most eyes, the two central disks do not look the same size. The one surrounded by the big disks looks about 30 per cent smaller than the one with small disks — an illusion called size contrast.” It’s called the Ebbinghaus Illusion.
From this, it does seem our perception of something is based on the surrounding context. And the context can easily fool us into wrong conclusions.
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At the same time, context can’t be ignored, as two relatively recent books taught me. One, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein talks about how our memories are intertwined with contextual information. The other book, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise opines data is nothing without context.
Since the day I read Dr. Ramachandran’s book, it’s been easy for me to recall that multi-circle image whenever I needed reassurance about human fallibility. And yes, it also appears in my thoughts when I have to judge someone or something!
