If an Elephant cries does anyone hear it?
Perceive, through my tear stained eye.
It has been awhile friends. I have half-written posts and half-concocted ideas, but this is the first of a series on perception. It will attempt to ponder questions on how we perceive ourselves, each other and the world. Please comment if you want to join in and share.
Part 1 - Perception Through My Tear Stained Eyes.
Tear Stained Eye (Son Volt)
St. Genevieve can hold back the water
Saints don't bother
With the-tear stained eye
Like a man said
Rode hard and put away wet
Throw away the bad news
Put it to rest
If learning is living
And the truth is a state of mind
You'll find it's better
At the end of the line
It is perhaps more than ironic that the town Saint Genevieve, Missouri that was named after a bonafide Saint that could perform miracles, including weather related events and stopping floods, was itself flooded terribly in 1993.
The city was partially swallowed by the river after its levee was breached by the relentless flood waters of the Mississippi. The photo shows the high water mark in Saint Genevieve, MO 1993 flood and others. It is staggering to see the disaster that can be unleashed and at times we are powerless to stop it despite our best efforts.
The Levee Game
In the battle of levees, each city competes to build a better and taller levee than the next. When the rivers are full each city becomes competitive against nature and also against its competing cities’ levees in a way. Height of the levee provides some protection as it allows the channel to be higher and move faster without a breach in your city. But, that just pushes more pressure, against those cities that can’t afford the higher levee. Each breach of a lesser levee that isn’t your own relieves some pressure as they become part of the flood plain.
Can this be analogized to people? Are we each our own cities, building defenses to our environments? We consciously build mental defense systems, proverbial levees to protect from the onslaught of harmful emotions and sensory inputs to try and keep our brain bucket safe internally. We engineer mental protective layers to protect from nature, our environment and each other. And sometimes we act and build in competition with our fellow humans. As the Son Volt song above says, that “truth is a state of mind,” then so is our perception of the truth.
What we perceive as comfortable and safe for us, might be complete hell for another. How do we understand, and tolerate the differences where it invokes Nash Equilibriums and Game Theory? What happens when what is ideal for me and based on my perception of reality causes pain to others?
Metal vs. Crickets
I demonstrate this happens often in life in the following chart. Where a stress receiver for me, collides into another as a stressor. Pretend that I have two options and my wife has two options. I listen to metal or sit on the porch. AND my wife has the same options. But our values of benefits and harms are different, between these two.
Obviously in life we don’t have perfect information. These decisions and outcomes don’t come with precognitive knowledge of their utility points. I just know that listening to metal is going to make me feel the best, that it is going to provide me the most stress relief at the time. How might I perceive my wife’s actions if she won’t let me listen to metal? May I decide that she is being too insensitive, unreasonable in forcing me to choose something that isn’t my ideal? I might do that, as I don’t know that metal music produces a negative score for her. The loud music literally causes her pain and harm. If I know the harm, maybe I choose to be altruistic by giving up a utility point to sit on the porch. Or maybe we just agree to do separate things, which in the scenario above was the highest utilitarian outcome for us both. How do we as humans know the harms that are caused by ordinary things that are positive and normative for us, yet toxic and damaging for others?
In order to have any idea and understanding of this tradeoff, we might need to pause and try to perceive what it is like to walk in another's meat puppet for a bit. Our perception of what is… is based on our internal experiences and to a degree what is “normal.” What I mean by normal is that point on the distribution that is the norm. Maybe we can even perceive as normal what is 1 standard deviation from the norm, but weird is everything further out. Maybe neurodivergence can be looked at as those with sensory inputs and outputs that are just a standard deviation or two from the norm. Neurodivergence is natural, and is only a difference, a rarer neurotype.
Update. Part 2.0 of this series is out.
I found the following video as I have been wrestling with loss, grief and trying to understand EVERYTHING a little more. The video is very helpful in illustrating the difficulties that neurodivergent people might have in a school environment and life. Illustrations are necessary as the internal chaos is not always able to be perceived by others, but comes alive through the artists creativity. I hope you will take a moment to watch. I will refer to it in future posts. To perceive the world, we might need to look through someone else’s Tear Stained Eye.