I have wondered all my life, “Why can’t people “see?” I am not talking about blindness but a lack of awareness of the parts of our environments that create disharmony. We could change them to bring more harmony into our lives. First, however, we would have to “see” them. Without awareness, people can’t make the decision to make their environments more life enhancing. This lesson, Why People Can’t “See,” Lesson VI, Part A is a reflection of my quest.
The Most Famous Tear in American History
A visual that still reflects my angst about the loss of seeing is a commercial made in 1971 for the anti-litter organization Keep America Beautiful.
A Native-American, Iron Eyes Cody, is seen paddling a birch bark canoe in a river that becomes increasingly polluted. As he comes close to a bustling highway near the polluted shore, he notices a paper bag being hurled out of the car, exploding at his feet with garbage, coffee cups and fast-food refuse. The camera then pans to his etched leathery face, revealing a single tear falling, ever so slowly, down his cheek. . It’s probably the most famous tear in American history.
The Story Behind America’s Most Famous Commercial
The tear was a symbol for me of how I felt about the effects of bad design whether is was clutter, ugliness or outdoor litter. Unfortunately, everything about the ad was not based on pure intentions. According to Professor Finis Dunaway author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images, the commercial was based on many duplicities. First of all, Iron Eyes Cody was an Italian-American actor with some anti Native American sentiments.
The second duplicity was the hypocrisy of using a Native-American to reflect the reverence for the land because they were symbolic of native ecological wisdom. At the time the commercial aired, the wisdom of the Native –Americans was ignored, as they were trying to regain their rights on Alcatraz Island as they have continued to do until the present time, with the Keystone XL pipeline, the Dakota Access pipeline and other threatening environmental projects.
How the Environmental Movement Was Fooled
According to Finis, the most significant duplicity, however, was that Keep America Beautiful was staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives. Founded in 1953, it was composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations like the American Can Co. and the Owens-Illinois Glass Co. They were later joined by the likes of Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Co.
The commercial was a subtle message to deflect responsibility for litter from corporations to individuals. At the moment the tear appears, the narrator, in a deep heart-breaking voice, intones: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” According to Finis, “By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.”Finis noted, “When the ad debuted, Keep America Beautiful enjoyed the support of mainstream environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. But these organizations soon resigned from its advisory council over an important environmental debate of the 1970s: efforts to pass bottle bills, legislation that would require soft drink and beer producers to sell, as they had until quite recently, their beverages in reusable containers.”
“The shift to the throwaway was responsible, in part, for the rising levels of litter that Keep America Beautiful publicized, but also, as environmentalists emphasized, for the mining of vast quantities of natural resources and the production of various kinds of pollution and the generation of tremendous amounts of solid waste.” Despite that, the Keep America Beautiful leadership lined up against the bottle bills”
Even though the commercial was a sham, the most famous tear in America is still real for many of us echoing the unanswered question why people don’t see?
How the Brain Helps Us Not to “See”
Twelve years ago, I completed a small renovation on our apartment. It was painted and the floors were buffed. I bought a new couch and curtains. I pretty much finished all of it, except for some bathroom items and a light fixture in the hall. We finished the bathroom quickly enough but the hall light fixture I wanted was on back order. Eventually, it needed to be reordered. After awhile, I just forgot about it. Day after day I walked under the lone light bulb dangling from a wire from the hall ceiling until I could not see it anymore.
I am sure you can find your own example of the hanging light bulb. We all do it. It is not as if we don’t see it. I saw the light bulb every day with my eye/brain. Somehow, however, the mind blocked out the brains input. This is a common neural adaption.
The Overworked Brain
The brain is like a computer on steroids. It processes ten million pieces of information per second. To deal with this overload, it chooses efficient ways to organize information. According to neuroscientists, one way the brain deals with consistent input is to ignore it. The brain thinks, “Same o, same o.” In an attempt to preserve energy, it will simply stop noticing that input. This will continue unless one specifically directs ones attention towards it. I refer to this perceptual adaptation as a “cognitive override.” So looking at poor design, garbage on the streets or a hanging light bulb is simply not “seen” and consequently it can’t be changed.
The Effects of Not Seeing
Unfortunately, it is not just the body or mind that is affected by what we see. In my opinion, there is another part of the human persona that is affected. It is not known through science but only known in the laboratory of one’s own personal experience. For want of a better name, I call it the subliminal self. It pulls in the beauty that makes us feel alive.
Sadly, one’s subliminal self is not subject to a cognitive override. It sees everything because it is constantly searching for patterns. So when it comes to bad design or litter, a perfect storm sets in. Our brain, through a cognitive over ride, dismisses these negative erratic patterns. But the ever-vigilant subliminal self sees them all and experiences fatigue from all the visual noise. We see the disharmony, and “feel” their effects but override the fact that we do.
Not “seeing” creates a lot of other problems. Studies have shown that the continuous existence of litter, despite not being noticed, inspires more litter.
The irony is that in order to get people to stop littering, there must be no litter.
Even though we only need to perceive a few details to see an object, paradoxically we see everything. This means we see the scratches on the baseboard, the heel scuffs on the floor and the gum on the sidewalk. We see the grime on the light switch, the broken cabinet handle and the smudges on the stainless steel refrigerator…
In real life, you can’t get rid of all the items, which create visual noise but we can try to eliminate most of them.
The first step is overriding the cognitive override.
To use decorating to enhance our lives, we have to become aware when we are not “seeing” what we see.
The Ego and Vision
On one occasion, I helped a colleague in the public schools decorate her new office. She shared it with two others. The custodians painted the room battle- ship gray. A few holes were left in the ceiling from vent openings. There was a general din of dirt, rusted linoleum and unfinished woodwork. There was little money in the schools for aesthetic needs so she had to undertake changing her environment with her own efforts. She asked me if sponge- painting the wall would, help. I said it would after we dealt with all the clutter. She said that she would paint, but only her section of the room, which was bordered on one side by a storage cabinet and the other side by a shelf.
With a sigh, I immediately thought of the saying in the Talmud: “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.
I asked her if she didn’t see the other parts of the room, and whether she would not be affected by the undecorated parts.
I realized that her concept of perception had to do with territory and was an ego form of thinking. She couldn’t see the whole picture, only her part even though her subliminal self saw everything and was depleted. To get energy in our environment, we have to look at it as a series of patterns encompassing the whole not as individual ego parts.
Seeing “Nothing” Because We Are Told to Do So
I was told as a child that cellophane tape was great to use in art projects because it was invisible. I could, however, always see it. Even Scotch Magic Tape, the kind that is frosty on the rolls and is supposedly invisible on paper calls my attention.
It has always been one of my pet peeves in schools to see posters hung with several inches of cellophane tape extending two to three inches onto the wall. Understandably the school didn’t have the money to frame the posters but I felt that they could still be displayed aesthetically.
Decorating with the Mad Tapers
I would often work with a group of students to do some school beautification work. We often came to a wall in the classroom that was “the great poster” wall. It held a history of long gone posters, papers and flyers. The only thing that remained were little bits of cellophane tape, hundreds of pieces, some fused to the wall with heat and age and some with black edges as they became magnets for trapped dust. When I commented on the tape to students, I was told not to worry because nobody could see this “invisible tape.” The students were not seeing the tape, but were seeing the symbol of what the tape meant to them through conditioning and education.
Mad tapers are everywhere. Wherever we go, we find signs of communication in , bathrooms, doctor’s office, classrooms and hospitals, post offices, and all public buildings. We may even do it in our own homes. Using a tape roll on the four back corners is of the same cost. Matting or framing in an inexpensive frame calms down all the details, leading to more visual harmony. Offices of financial means do this.
Seeing Affected by Community Pressure
One of the most interesting studies about perception took place in 1951 by Solomon Asch, a Gestalt psychologist. It was more than a study on visual perception, it was how an individual’s visual perception was affected by the opinions of the community. Asch gave the participants a card with three different length lines. He asked the participants to tell which were longer or shorter.
Unknown to the participants were people acting as participants, called confederates. They were placed to determine how their responses would affect the real participants. At first the confederates, who were always called first, gave the correct answers. Eventually, the confederates purposely gave the wrong answers.
Initially the true participants went along with the correct answers but when three confederates gave the wrong answers, many of the true participants started giving incorrect answers.
The Results
Asch was shocked to find that about one third of the participants went along with the erroneous majority on all the vision tests. In some tests, 37 out of 50 went along with the erroneous material at least once.
When asked later about their performance most of the true participants indicated that they knew they were giving wrong information. They wanted to go along with the group for fear of ridicule for their lack of conformity. A few participants said they actually believed the incorrect information was correct. They actually “saw” what the confederates said they saw. Their brains cognitively overrode their true perceptions.
The experiment had far reaching ramifications. The country had just come out of WWII which saw the effects of the holocaust. Questions arose about how societies could have allowed this to happen. The Solomon Asch studies proved how easy it was to affect a person’s judgment. If a simple visual perceptual experiment could be affected by group pressure, how easy would it be to have group pressure affect the individual’s moral compass.
If those around us don’t “see,” does this affect our ability to see our environment? Will our need to conform also blind us?
As We Search for Answers Why People Don’t See
I think that there may be a lot of factors that cause people not to “see.” advertising manipulation and social conformity issues are one. The ego and territorial issue are another. The brain’s desire to ignore stimuli to ovrrrcome stimuli overload is another.
The questions just bring up more questions. And I have one more big one. It is a stretch but worth the perusal. In Why People Can’t “See,” Lesson VI, Part B, we will continue the quest.
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There are two parts to this website, The Lessons, which are more difficult in concept, and the blogs, which are lighter in nature. Blogs that you might enjoy with the same theme as Small Spaces are:
Two Lessons that relate to this blog are:
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