Nod Once for “No” Bill Tune bctune@gmail.com Have you ever noticed how wrong other people can be when describing an event of which you have similar knowledge? Even my most intelligent friends and family are prone to relate accounts of past experiences that simply do not concur with my memories of the same events. What's worse is their complete lack of appreciation when I point this out. While many of these discrepancies can be attributed to their poor memories---they aren't getting any younger, if you know what I mean---another possible explanation is that people perceive things differently. In other words, it's all relative. Each of us on some plane wants/expects the whole world to share our perspective and view the world as we do. Sadly, it does not work that way, and this explains a lot of the world's ills today. Have you ever noticed the reaction of sports fans to a close call by a referee? Even with the same visual evidence (possibly shown repeatedly on instant replay), fans will disagree vigorously on the call. Interestingly enough, each side will tend to favor the interpretation that benefits their team. Curious? Not really. The human brain has an amazing ability to alter visual evidence and is subject to conditioning, culture, and desire. In the case of the irate fans, while some are just kidding themselves, most sincerely believe they are justified in their claims. (“What do you MEAN Dez Bryant didn't catch that ball?!?” January, 2015) I've never known a fan whose team lost a close basketball game that thought the referees did a good job. Perspective is everything. The classic illustration of this is the story of the four blind men asked to describe an elephant: The first finds the tail and says, “The elephant must be like a rope!” The second reaches out and touches a leg. He says, “The elephant is like a great tree!” The third pats the side of the elephant and says, “No, it is like a wall.” The fourth feels the elephant's trunk and claims, “The elephant is like a snake!” While each man's description was accurate, their inability to see the whole animal prevented them from understanding what an elephant was really like. Our eyes are not as trustworthy as we like to think. We've all heard about conflicting eyewitness reports where people who share the same experience can “see” very different things. My favorite example of this is a video available on YouTube. Unless you choose to immediately view this video before reading on, I'm going to ruin it for you; but you can still try it on your friends. Six people are bouncing and passing a basketball, three wearing white and three wearing black. The narrator asks you to count the number of passes made by the white team. When I first saw this video, I felt pretty good about my answer at the end because I know how above average I am in my ability to pay attention. Then he said, “Did you see the gorilla?” WHAT?? Sure enough, when I watched the video again, I saw a man in a gorilla suit walk through the middle of the bouncing basketballs! It really makes a difference what we're paying attention to! [Note: also check out The Monkey Business Solution by Daniel Simons on YouTube.] What we perceive today is largely influenced by what we've experienced. Everyone has different life experiences that shape how he or she sees the world. A few years back Beverly spent a few days in the hospital while the doctors slowly diagnosed her case of shingles. She is what I like to call, a mild diabetic. She treats it with medication and tests her blood sugar daily. Her numbers usually run between 90 and 120, pretty good numbers for a diabetic. Due to the chaos of the hospital stay, she skipped her meds for a couple of days. When they tested her blood sugar it was 140. Bev's and my reaction was, “Oh no! That's too high!” But before we could say anything, our friends in the room had this reaction, “My, that's a good number!” As it turns out, one of them has several diabetics in the family, some who have had blood sugar readings in the 300-400 range. By comparison Bev's sounded pretty good. As small children try to make sense of the world around them, their lack of basic knowledge leads them to many erroneous and often humorous conclusions. Every parent has stories of how cute the innocence of youth can be. When my son was 5, he asked how the sun could set each night without setting the grass on fire. [<Insert your story here.>] We once hosted a foreign exchange student from Bulgaria. Tania was a delight to know except for one quirk. Bulgarians' head nods are opposite ours! Shaking from side to side is an affirmative response and nodding up and down is negative. That was her normal. Since we knew she would be better off if she were more like us, we slapped her every time she nodded her head incorrectly until she finally started doing it our way. Not really! We loved getting to know Tania and her different customs. It was a powerful reminder that the whole world is not, nor should it be, exactly like us. Most of us are woefully ignorant of the customs of other countries, but then we don't even know many of the different cultures in our own country. [i.e., A small-town boy's first visit to New Orleans can be quite an eye opener.] Each of us has his own “normal” and as we learn more about others that normal is, or should be, constantly challenged. When my brother and I shared an apartment in college, he once fixed tuna salad for lunch. The roommates were surprised to find apples in the tuna. We were surprised that they were surprised because Budd had made it the “normal” way - just like Mom used to. Not only do we have little understanding of the customs of foreigners, we often have little understanding of how the people across the street live. My grandparents were all deceased before my birth. I assumed this was normal until I started school and discovered that I was the only kid without living grandparents. Just as a child's understanding of the world changes as he learns more about how it works, our society's perception of the world has changed a great deal over the centuries. For instance, we now know that we do not live on a flat Earth in the center of the universe. This big blue ball travels around the Sun, not the other way around. Also, being left-handed is no longer considered sinister, even though most of the world is right handed. Attitudes towards race, gender equality, religion, and sexual orientation continue to evolve in our society, though painfully slow in some areas. Why is tolerance so difficult? Why do some people spend so much energy justifying their intolerance? Why can't we just all get along? We apparently do not know how to be different - peacefully. I feel the biggest obstacle to tolerance is ignorance. Fear of the unknown is a basic human emotion, and the less we know about “the other” the more we fear it. Today we live in a world where massive amounts of information are easily available which should help alleviate the ignorance problem. Unfortunately, this wealth of information is mixed in with an equally massive amount of misinformation. Instead of a common education, which brings us together, our “information age” fuels both sides of every debate. Most of us have our trusted sources of news that reinforce our beliefs. We quickly and eagerly take in the sound-bytes that reaffirm our prejudices, even when accuracy and validity should be suspect. Instead of coming together, we grow further apart. Don't confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up! Most would agree that extremism is a major problem. There are countless acts of atrocity attributed to this phenomenon. What is extremism? My simplistic definition is the following: EXTREMISM: when someone thinks that he is SO right, that he does something wrong. The sad truth is that there are good guys and bad guys on both sides. So how do we go about creating what every beauty queen candidate wants - World Peace? I don't pretend to have that answer, but I think this would be a better world if more people would open their minds to new information and new understandings. Maybe they would be slower to judge and quicker to help others. And as any Texan will tell you, Dez Bryant DID catch that ball! enough

Nod Once for “No”

Have you ever noticed how wrong other people can be when describing an event of which you have similar knowledge? Even my most intelligent friends and family are prone to relate accounts of past experiences that simply do not concur with my memories of the same events. What's worse is their complete lack of appreciation when I point this out. While many of these discrepancies can be attributed to their poor memories---they aren't getting any younger, if you know what I mean---another possible explanation is that people perceive things differently. In other words, it's all relative. Each of us on some plane wants/expects the whole world to share our perspective and view the world as we do. Sadly, it does not work that way, and this explains a lot of the world's ills today.

Have you ever noticed the reaction of sports fans to a close call by a referee? Even with the same visual evidence (possibly shown repeatedly on instant replay), fans will disagree vigorously on the call. Interestingly enough, each side will tend to favor the interpretation that benefits their team. Curious? Not really. The human brain has an amazing ability to alter visual evidence and is subject to conditioning, culture, and desire. In the case of the irate fans, while some are just kidding themselves, most sincerely believe they are justified in their claims. (“What do you MEAN Dez Bryant didn't catch that ball?!?” January, 2015) I've never known a fan whose team lost a close basketball game that thought the referees did a good job.

Perspective is everything. The classic illustration of this is the story of the four blind men asked to describe an elephant: The first finds the tail and says, “The elephant must be like a rope!” The second reaches out and touches a leg. He says, “The elephant is like a great tree!” The third pats the side of the elephant and says, “No, it is like a wall.” The fourth feels the elephant's trunk and claims, “The elephant is like a snake!” While each man's description was accurate, their inability to see the whole animal prevented them from understanding what an elephant was really like.

Our eyes are not as trustworthy as we like to think. We've all heard about conflicting eyewitness reports where people who share the same experience can “see” very different things. My favorite example of this is a video available on

YouTube. Unless you choose to immediately view this video before reading on, I'm going to ruin it for you; but you can still try it on your friends. Six people are bouncing and passing a basketball, three wearing white and three wearing black. The narrator asks you to count the number of passes made by the white team. When I first saw this video, I felt pretty good about my answer at the end because I know how above average I am in my ability to pay attention. Then he said, “Did you see the gorilla?” WHAT?? Sure enough, when I watched the video again, I saw a man in a gorilla suit walk through the middle of the bouncing basketballs! It really makes a difference what we're paying attention to! [Note: also check out The Monkey Business Solution by Daniel Simons on YouTube.]

What we perceive today is largely influenced by what we've experienced. Everyone has different life experiences that shape how he or she sees the world. A few years back Beverly spent a few days in the hospital while the doctors slowly diagnosed her case of shingles. She is what I like to call, a mild diabetic. She treats it with medication and tests her blood sugar daily. Her numbers usually run between 90 and 120, pretty good numbers for a diabetic. Due to the chaos of the hospital stay, she skipped her meds for a couple of days. When they tested her blood sugar it was 140. Bev's and my reaction was, “Oh no! That's too high!” But before we could say anything, our friends in the room had this reaction, “My, that's a good number!” As it turns out, one of them has several diabetics in the family, some who have had blood sugar readings in the 300-400 range. By comparison Bev's sounded pretty good.

As small children try to make sense of the world around them, their lack of basic knowledge leads them to many erroneous and often humorous conclusions. Every parent has stories of how cute the innocence of youth can be. When my son was 5, he asked how the sun could set each night without setting the grass on fire. [<Insert your story here.>]

We once hosted a foreign exchange student from Bulgaria. Tania was a delight to know except for one quirk. Bulgarians' head nods are opposite ours! Shaking from side to side is an affirmative response and nodding up and down is negative. That was her normal. Since we knew she would be better off if she were more like us, we slapped her every time she nodded her head incorrectly until she finally started doing it our way. Not really! We loved getting to know Tania and her different customs. It was a powerful reminder that the whole world is not, nor should it be, exactly like us.

Most of us are woefully ignorant of the customs of other countries, but then we don't even know many of the different cultures in our own country. [i.e., A small-town boy's first visit to New Orleans can be quite an eye opener.] Each of us has his own “normal” and as we learn more about others that normal is, or should be, constantly challenged. When my brother and I shared an apartment in college, he once fixed tuna salad for lunch. The roommates were surprised to find apples in the tuna. We were surprised that they were surprised because Budd had made it the “normal” way - just like Mom used to. Not only do we have little understanding of the customs of foreigners, we often have little understanding of how the people across the street live.

My grandparents were all deceased before my birth. I assumed this was normal until I started school and discovered that I was the only kid without living grandparents. Just as a child's understanding of the world changes as he learns more about how it works, our society's perception of the world has changed a great deal over the centuries. For instance, we now know that we do not live on a flat Earth in the center of the universe. This big blue ball travels around the Sun, not the other way around. Also, being left-handed is no longer considered sinister, even though most of the world is right handed. Attitudes towards race, gender equality, religion, and sexual orientation continue to evolve in our society, though painfully slow in some areas.

Why is tolerance so difficult? Why do some people spend so much energy justifying their intolerance? Why can't we just all get along? We apparently do not know how to be different - peacefully.

I feel the biggest obstacle to tolerance is ignorance. Fear of the unknown is a basic human emotion, and the less we know about “the other” the more we fear it. Today we live in a world where massive amounts of information are easily available which should help alleviate the ignorance problem. Unfortunately, this wealth of information is mixed in with an equally massive amount of misinformation. Instead of a common education, which brings us together, our “information age” fuels both sides of every debate. Most of us have our trusted sources of news that reinforce our beliefs. We quickly and eagerly take in the sound-bytes that reaffirm our prejudices, even when accuracy and validity should be suspect. Instead of coming together, we grow further apart. Don't confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up!

Most would agree that extremism is a major problem. There are countless acts of atrocity attributed to this phenomenon. What is extremism? My simplistic definition is the following: EXTREMISM: when someone thinks that he is SO right, that he does something wrong.

The sad truth is that there are good guys and bad guys on both sides. So how do we go about creating what every beauty queen candidate wants - World Peace? I don't pretend to have that answer, but I think this would be a better world if more people would open their minds to new information and new understandings. Maybe they would be slower to judge and quicker to help others.

And as any Texan will tell you, Dez Bryant DID catch that ball!

enough

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