What a person sees  “depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see.”   ― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions     Listen on Blubrry Listen on iTunes  Listen on Spotify   What we see depends on what we look at.    What we look at depends on our previous experiences.      Our previous experiences create a field of vision.      This field of vision is always limited.  Always.  There is no possibility that we can be aware of everything.  This would overwhelm our system to a point of collapse because it would not be able to process every single quanta of information that enters our senses.   Our field of vision is therefore always incomplete and imperfect.  This concept is what Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon calls ‘bounded rationality’.*   Our first experiences with our families create the experience-dependent prediction networks in our brain.     These prediction networks act like a dial that zooms in our attention according to what we already predict or assume.     It then focuses our attention on that and blurs out the rest.      This is what is happening in terms of how we even ‘see’ physical matter.  Matter is made up of blinking electron clouds of potential that flash in and out of existence.  Yet we can’t ‘see’ this when we look at our hand or a chair.     Our brain has to dull out and blur massive amounts of information to make sense of what we see.   This doesn’t mean that the data in the form of waves and particles isn’t there right in front of us.  We just can’t see it. In the same sense, this happens to us as we navigate our social worlds. Our brain prioritizes information in this way:   Threat Goals Strong emotion   This is important for us to understand because it means that the focusing mechanism of our ‘beam of awareness’ will be first geared toward figuring out what will hurt us (and when it think it’s ‘found’ the threat, it will blur out all other information).      If our system then does not detect threat, it can look towards what will help it achieve its goals.  From a social level this also means that we often see people as either pathways to our goal or obstacles in the way.     Strong emotions become the next target of our focusing mechanism (beam of awareness).  Social media capitalizes on all three of the above.    The algorithms naturally pick up on the highest priority of our nervous system because that’s what we click on and share the most.       This is what I also see happening in many of the human social experiences that are occurring today.     We each believe we are seeing the whole picture.     But we are imperfect humans with imperfect information.   Always…. This can’t be disputed from a molecular, neurobiological perspective!   This means that there is always room for more information to flow into our awareness.     There is always another perspective.     The more different that perspective is from what you already think, the better.     Why?  Because if you continue to keep your focus on wha...