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Things We Never Notice

By PAPPY MOORE

IN THE YEAR 2000, I bought a computer, and since that time, I’ve used the same speakers for my computer, even though I’ve changed computers twice. Those same two speakers have been sitting two feet from my eyes every day, for eight years. I just noticed last week that each has the product name “Boston” clearly displayed on its face.

How in the world could anyone sit two feet from computer speakers every day for over 3000 days, and still never notice that each had the word “Boston” clearly on its face? These are the kind of questions I ponder when trying to understand why each of us sees a different world when we view it.

TWO PEOPLE who come from the same town, in the same family, who believe largely the same important things in life, can see the same event and not see the same event at all. Police know this from talking to multiple witnesses to accidents. Everyone sees something different.

So much of what we see is specific to us. Our brain is unique to us. We trained it about what it should notice and what it should ignore, and often, it does too good a job. The result is that we each have terrible blind spots, like my blind spot for the product name of the computer speakers. Since I don’t really need to know the product name of the speakers, my mind studiously ignored it.

MY MIND is more and more like my computer. It doesn’t work very well when I try to make it do too many things at once, and will freeze up on me if I overload it. When I try to store too much information, it slows down my processing. I tend not to pay attention to businesses or buildings I never frequent. My mind’s eye simply ignores them, while seeing them visually in the scene. Someone tells me “it’s right next to that coffee shop.” I may have driven past it 10 times a week for years, and never saw it, because I’m never looking for a coffee shop.

If they sell hamburgers, then I’ll know where they are. THERE’S A 50-foot sign I drive past all the time. It’s a big fish, and word is it cost the owner $75,000 to have it made. It’s a great-looking fish, perfect for the lake. I could not have told you what it was advertising until my sister mentioned it. My eyes saw the fish sign, but my mind did not read or record the words on the sign.

The differences in how our minds record the life around us explain why two people can share common events and recall different things. Each of us is creating his or her own never- ending movie, in which we star. Our mind can only focus on one thing at a time, in spite of our affection for claiming we multi task. When we focus on that one thing, we are largely blinded to other things.

We should never assume that others are seeing the world exactly as we are. They probably aren’t.

© 2008, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved. Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com

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