CONCEPT TO SEE:

INFORMATION BLINDNESS

Consider these recurring questions: What do you see? What do you NOT see?

You “see” many things. Yet, for multiple reasons, you do not “see” many elements of what you experience. This reflects the complexity of our environments, especially human behavior and interactions, and the necessarily limited nature of learning experiences for each individual.

We learn to recognize groupings of stimuli, and eventually their meaning and significance, through repeated exposure to them in our life experiences. Once we learn their meaning we utilize the information they provide to us about our environments, and how they instruct us to improve our adaptive responses to our environments.

Having never encountered coffee, someone exposed to the smell and sight of coffee for the first time would not recognize or understand their meaning, and ignore them as yet another of the infinitely varied smells and sights of the environment — even as two new friends in her new country express happy anticipatory excitement about the smell. The sensory organs and sensory pathways needed to process the stimuli are intact and functioning well, but when the sensory signals reach the brain, the brain registers the stimuli but fails to recognize them on this first exposure. The brain is unable to interpret the meaning of the stimulus group because it has never experienced these stimuli before and, therefore, has not built up the memory resources that gradually represent the stimuli, their meaning, and their significance for future adaptive responses.

In other words, the experiential life history of many individuals might not have included exposure to these stimuli, or, at least, sufficient exposure to ensure experiential learning that alters their adaptive repertoire. Lacking experiential learning about the meaning of a group of stimuli in the environment, the brain is unable to recognize that these stimuli comprise a group, and to interpret the meaning of the stimuli. This might be called, alternatively, interpretation blindness, indicating proper sensory functioning but a lack of the necessary interpretive functions in the brain.

In order to facilitate our understanding of this everyday phenomenon, it is helpful to give a name to “what you do NOT see”. The simple phrase “blind spots” comes to mind and has advantages. Therefore, what you do not “see” can be called “blind spots”.

More generally, this condition determining “what you do NOT see” can be designated as “information blindness”, indicating the condition in which adaptively useful information is present in the environment of an individual, but he is unable to use it due to his lack of prior exposure to the information, his lack of experiential learning of this specific constellation of information. He is unable to see the information due to his information blindness.

EVERYONE has blind spots, or information blindness, because each of us have had a unique set of life experiences from which we learned. No one has had all possible life experiences; our learning is necessarily limited and incomplete.

If we do not learn Farsi or Portuguese as we are growing up, then we cannot speak these languages and have information blindness in relation to them — blind spots for these two languages. If either language is spoken in our presence, the necessary information is conveyed to our sensory organs, but we are blind to the meaning of the stimuli.

If our life experiences do not teach us about specific behaviors or interactive behaviors (such as empathy, or a tolerance for hard work), we have information blindness for these behaviors.

Yet, information blindness for behaviors and behavioral meanings generally is not recognized and we all are treated as if we should be capable of understanding the full range of these behaviors. Of course, this is an irrational expectation, and it occurs because we have not yet been taught about the concept of information blindness concerning human behavior and behavioral interactions. We have information blindness about the irrational expectation that each of us has a complete repertoire of life experiences enabling us to recognize and understand all human behaviors and behavioral interactions.

We are expected to have empathy even if our experiences did not teach us to have empathy — making this an irrational expectation — but we are not expected to solve a differential equation if we have not been taught calculus — making this is a rational expectation.

In short, why do we not “see” important elements of human interactions? There are multiple reasons, but the most common reason is that we were not taught to “see” these specific behavior elements.

What is significant for you to “see” in relation to this problem? In other words, what are some of the essential, practical meanings of the common human phenomenon of information blindness?

When you are taught specific elements to observe in human interactions, you will see them. For example, consider the depiction of a complete lack of empathy, an aggressive lack of awareness of the behaviors and communications of others or oneself, and their meanings, in the following scene from one of the screwball comedies of the 1930s.

A TASTE OF LIFE

The film exaggerates these behaviors, of course, but it is quite accurate otherwise, depicting the obtuse, frustrating, and selfish behaviors of someone with information blindness concerning human behavior and behavioral interactions, and their meanings. It is done in a comic manner, retaining the audience; if it is presented in a scolding, academic manner it will only provoke disputes or a wish not to think about these all too unpleasant and familiar aspects of life.

She has immense information blindness about her own behavior, its significance, and how it affects others — in particular, how it causes pain and unhappiness and very significant practical problems for others. Her blind spots cause her to persist, completely unaware that others view her behavior as aggressive and unsophisticated — although her apparent upperclass origins disguise this lack of sophistication within other domains of culturally designated sophisticated behavior.

Due to the information blindness of one person, they are behaving with very different expectations and rules for behavior. In this film clip the man is characterized to have particularly strong self-control and avoidance of aggressive behavior, respect for others (his golf partner, the woman damaging his car), and a capacity for reasoning about what is occurring.

However, his expectation is that she possesses these abilities also, but she does not; this is a form of information blindness that is common in those with excellent self-control. He is then made to look foolish in the film because of this behavior, a common film solution for the problems ensuing from the pairing of individuals with these very different behavioral characteristics.

Another notable feature of these situations in this film is that there is almost no expectation that someone with the information blindness that she exhibits will change these behaviors.

These problems of information blindness have been recognized and commented upon across the centuries by writers in the great civilizations. In many of these classic commentaries the damage to individuals is related to the destructive effects on groups, even groups as large as an overarching culture. The latter occurs when a leader — an individual, or a very small leadership group — has information blindness about some important concept(s) and this causes cultural harm. Of course this is a very common phenomenon as societies emerge and develop, and is possibly the major cause of cultural decline. At its worst, “the blind leading the blind” can involve a massive number of people and cause extraordinary cultural harm and suffering.

VOICES

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that whoever tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,’ then that person ned not honor the father. So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:

“This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

teaching human precepts as doctrines.'”

Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when thy heard what you said?” He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; thy are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

The Gospel According to Matthew 15:1-20. In: Michael D. Coogan (ed.) (2010). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, An Ecumenical Study Bible, Fully Revised Fourth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  pp. 1768-1769.

IMAGE:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind (1568)

Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy

FILM CLIP:

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Howard Hawks, Director; RKO Radio Pictures