Becoming Perceptive

Perception is a controlled hallucination.1 When you perceive the world, you do not simply see what is in front of you. Instead, your brain predicts what you will see. You hallucinate reality. But the hallucination is controlled , because the prediction is measured against the input you receive from your eyes and your ears and if it is too far off, ... See more

When Abraham Maslow did clinical studies of people who self-actualized, one thing that set them apart from others was, he wrote, that they lived “more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.” They were, to put it simply, more per... See more

That a portrait painter gets better at seeing faces and a scientist better at seeing the thing they study is unsurprising, but do they get more perceptive overall? Probably a little bit. They at the very least learn to appreciate how hard it is to see what is really going on.

If you are confused about your feelings, or in denial about how the world works, or unable to read others, it will be harder to self-actualize. If you are too constrained by what you think is going on to notice what is actually going on—you will miss important data that would allow you to make better choices.