Tag Archives: see

Flying with Understanding

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Bald-eagle-wallpaper2In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a rather silly story made into a really silly movie, Richard Bach wrote these words, which I find enchanting:

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you.   All they show is limitations.  Look with your understanding.  Find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.

As a child, my self-esteem, on a scale from one to ten, was well below zero.   My mother, catching me during a moment of extreme self-doubt, told me that I was capable of doing anything in life that I wanted.  Challenging her optimism, I told her snootily that I could never fly.   Undaunted, she lovingly crouched down, put her arms on my shoulders, looked me directly in the eyes, and said, “Ira, if you wanted to badly enough, you could fly.”

At first, in my confusion, I began to trust my mother less.   But there was a part of me that wanted to believe in her magical thinking.   So over the years her words, and the conviction with which they were spoken, echoed.  Eventually, I began to understand.

I knew that as a mere mortal I could never actually fly, but perhaps I could accomplish things that logic and reason (“eyes,” in Bach’s metaphor) couldn’t, if I could somehow learn how to look with my understanding.  Perhaps I could learn to not be deceived by the facts in front of me, by the obstacles that life creates, but instead to believe in my ability to understand that which transcends facts, just as my mother leapt over reality with her conviction and belief in me.

You may know the Hasidic story about the origins of the philtrum, that little indentation above the mouth and below the nose.  According to the story, when we are conceived we are given all the knowledge in the universe.   Then, at birth, God touches us right below our nose and we forget everything.  We then spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we already know.

What we already know is our understanding, which is more than the sum of our knowledge.   It is the way we imbue knowledge with meaning and connection that transforms it into understanding.

Understanding cannot be found simply by reference to our bodily sensations, or our “feelings.”  In instrument flying we learn that our eyes and the rest of our body can deceive us.   Our brain misinterprets the signals it receives through our senses.  We must, instead, fly with all of our understanding, and have faith that even if our bodies deceive us into thinking we are flying straight and level, we choose instead to believe what our instruments tell us.  And if our instruments give us conflicting messages, we must bring our entire understanding to the cockpit—the sum of our knowledge that transcends its parts and becomes a meaningful whole.

Our eyes do deceive us.  They show us the covers of books, but not what is inside of them.  They show us facts, and facts limit us.   They bind us to the ground; they show us what is, but never what can be.  They are the stories the news media, scientists, and our best friends tell us.  When we believe them, we deceive ourselves.     It is only through looking with our understanding that we can truly see, and it is only then that we can really fly.

Inattentional Blindness, or Hide It in Plain Sight

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imagesI have been known to search for my car keys when they are in my hand, or nervously prance around looking for my glasses when they were perched on top of my head.  Worse than that, I have even looked for my glasses while I was wearing them.  After all, it makes it much easier to find them. If you want to hide something, they say, put it in plain sight.

In the 1990’s, a group of researchers coined the term “inattentional blindness” to refer to the effect of not seeing something due to one’s attention being focused elsewhere.  The research that evolved from this approach was compelling.

It turns out that inattentional blindness is not only common, but it can easily kill you.  I have heard it said, for example, that the last thing many motorcyclists remember seeing before an accident are the eyes of the driver of the car that plowed into them. The driver of the car looks right at the motorcyclist, but because he isn’t expecting to see him, he just doesn’t.

In one study, a group of people were shown a short film showing three people in black T-shirts and three people in white T-shirts dribbling and tossing basketballs among them.  The subjects were asked to count how many times the players in white shirts caught a ball.  In the middle of the film, a woman in a black gorilla suit walks onto the floor, stops, turns, and waves at the camera.  She then slowly turns and walks off camera.  When the subjects were asked if they had seen anything unusual, fully half of them didn’t report seeing the gorilla at all.  Even when they tried the exercise a second time, a large percentage of the subjects didn’t see the gorilla.

This sort of thing has been replicated many ways and with many groups, including pilots.  In the late 1990s, NASA conducted an experiment to see if commercial pilots would notice distractions while making landings in a flight simulator.  In the simulation, an object rolled out onto the runway just as the plane was landing.  One-fourth of the highly experienced pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary and landed on top of the distraction.   Interestingly, untrained pilots who had no preconception of what to expect during a landing, always spotted the distraction.

One way to look at inattentional blindness is that it is just one point along the spectrum of attention and distraction.   In order to function, humans must constantly filter extraneous information, and in essence, go on autopilot.  Sleep is a kind of inattentional blindness, which is probably why it isn’t such a good idea to fall asleep while driving a car or flying an airplane.

This may all explain how it is that hiding something in plain sight makes it difficult to find.  Perhaps the act of “looking” for something is its own form of distraction; we are engaged in the looking and not the seeing.   Seek and ye shall find may be a truism, but perhaps if ye seek too much ye shall find nothing at all.