Looking but Not Seeing
We decided to hang a beautiful quilt on the wall of our grandson’s bedroom. I began by sewing a flat wooden stick across the top of the quilt so it would hold its shape. Then I needed two screw eyes to put at each end of the stick to hang it. So I went out to the garage and started rummaging through my trusty parts bin—it’s a little metal box containing 24 plastic drawers. It’s totally unorganized: in a single compartment you might find carpet tacks, washers, brass nails, a curl of wire, you name it.
Random rummaging didn’t produce any screw eyes. Thus, I started systematically at the upper left-hand drawer and worked my way across, then repeated the process across the next row. And eureka! At about drawer # 17 I indeed found two screw eyes snuggling up against some yellow wire nuts. I returned to the bedroom and attached them to each end of the stick. But then I needed two nails to hammer into the wall, on which to attach the screw eyes. What did I do? Naturally, I went back to the parts bin. Hmm. It occurred to me that just a few minutes previously I’d gone through almost all the drawers—why didn’t I remember which drawer contained the right size nails? The answer was obvious: I wasn’t looking for nails; I was looking for screw eyes. So I had to go through the whole drill again—across and down, across and down, looking afresh for nails. After digging through all 24 drawers, I decided that the nails in drawer # 8 would work the best. I was then able to hang the quilt. It looked quite nice, thank you very much.
After admiring the new wall hanging, I remembered that I’d decided to put a blackout curtain over the window so Ari would sleep better during his nap. To do so I needed push pins. Where could I find some? In the parts bin, of course. Did I recall seeing any push pins from the previous two romps though the 24 drawers? Of course not—I hadn’t been looking for push pins. So once again I started with drawer # 1.
What does this tell us about how our minds work? Among other things, it shows that we simply can’t take in the incredible amount of information that surrounds us, clamoring for our attention–we need to focus. But focus also means exclusion: the more we focus, the less we see. Thus, perhaps, the more single-mindedly we pursue a goal, the more we miss in life.
In a famous experiment, experienced radiologists were given a series of chest x-ray images and asked to identify any lung cancers. On this task they did very well. However, on one of the images the researchers superimposed a rather large black silhouette of a man dressed in a gorilla suit. And guess what? Only 18% of the radiologists noticed it! It’s not surprising that the vast majority didn’t see the hulking image—they were looking for cancers, not gorillas. This phenomenon is awkwardly but descriptively called “inattentional blindness.” In other words, “hiding in plain sight.”
No matter how busy we are, I think it might be a good idea to spend part of each day focused on nothing. Who knows what we’ll see!
A very astute and wise observation. My assessment would have been, “I’ve got to organize these drawers so I can find things!” Hahah. 🙂
That was my response! In fact, I need to get some drawers like that to help Terry’s workbench!
Love the insight (!) from this “Looking but not Seeing.”
I like the idea of focusing on nothing for about one minute during the day. How does one even do that? If you focus on focusing on nothing then you’re focusing on something, right? At the beginning of the post, my mind immediately went to the origin of that beautiful quilt; a condolence gift to me from one of my mom’s friends. And then my mind focused on the fact that the drawers had recently been painstakingly organized before the rummaging of said grandson in the little compartments. Interesting to notice where each of us goes.
Very trenchant observations, well articulated… I’m sure the evolutionary biologists are all over this!
I’m with Annie. My mind latched on to each section of your story, so it took a while for me to read it! I’m fixated on organizing things like that, so I may want to take a look at that box when ai visited in the future…