Look Again (2014 Spring Commencement Saturday morning)
- Date: 05/10/2014
- Author: Dr. Luis M. Proenza (President, The University of Akron)
- Location: E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall
Today you complete an important chapter of your life. Next month, I shall do likewise and complete my presidency here. Within these circumstances of beginnings and endings is an excellent opportunity for one final University of Akron lesson. This one is on me.
Everyone here today is experiencing the same sensory input. We see the same faces, hear the same music, and feel the same textures. But how we process that information varies dramatically. For many of you, this is all wonderfully new. I, on the other hand, am giving my 111th commencement address. And the parents, siblings, friends and other guests all bring varying viewpoints to this ceremony.
In other words, there are multiple perspectives in this ceremony, just as there are to nearly all aspects of life. And your ability to seek, appreciate, understand and act upon multiple perspectives will great affect your success in life.
Perhaps you will understand better in a few moments, when we present an honorary degree to Mrs. Kathleen A. Coleman. Her exceptional ability to do just that, to appreciate multiple perspectives and act upon them, has literally transformed lives and locations.
Let me give you yet another example.
A few years ago, a commercial was filmed in London for a prominent newspaper. This ad was so successful, it was described in some detail by John Steel in his book, Truth, Lies and Advertising. I quote:
". . . this commercial was shot in grainy black and white, more like a documentary than a commercial.”[i]
"It opens on a slow-motion scene of a rough-looking skinhead sprinting down the sidewalk of a dull terrace in an old industrial town. A car slows menacingly at the end of the street, perhaps in pursuit. A woman, standing on her doorstep, flinches as the skinhead runs past her…”[ii]
"We now see the same scene from a different angle. The skinhead darts past the woman, and this time we see that he's headed toward an old man, who is wearing a long overcoat and hat and carrying a briefcase. The old man raises his briefcase to defend himself as the thug makes a grab for him.”[iii]
"The commercial fades to a third scene, another replay of the same action, but this time shot from high up on a building across the street. We see that right above the old man, who is completely oblivious to the fact, a large tray of bricks is being hoisted up the side of a building. It is swaying dangerously, and the skinhead has spotted it…races down the street…grabs the old man and pushes him back against the wall to protect him as the bricks crash to the sidewalk."[iv]
It makes you think, doesn't it? Without all of those different perspectives considered, you easily could have been misled to an erroneous and negative conclusion and, possibly, to an unfortunate or misguided action.
Another complication is that our brains are hardwired to alter perceptions and memories, which sometimes cause us to misconstrue evidence and jump to conclusions.
Indeed, our perspectives are sometimes like blinders, allowing us to see only selected aspects of our environment while simultaneously keeping us from noticing other things that may be very close to us.
This idea, which I call the "strangeness of the familiar," is something all of us have experienced. When you are driving a vehicle, you know the streets you use to get home or to work. But if you travel those same streets as a passenger, or if you walk, you suddenly see things you never saw when you were the driver. It is, indeed, as if you are seeing things for the first time.
According to noted psychologists Dr. Christopher Chabris and Dr. Daniel Simons, we often suffer from Inattentional Blindness, in which we have trouble perceiving things that are in plain sight.[v] To demonstrate this, they created a video titled “Those Gorillas in our Midst,” a YouTube sensation that has received more than 10 million hits.[vi]
Filmed in 1999, this short video uses six students passing a basketball – three are wearing white; three are wearing black. Test subjects were asked to watch the video and count how many times the white shirts pass the ball. In the middle of the video, a woman in a gorilla suit strolls into the action, faces the camera and thumps her chest before leaving, spending a total of nine seconds on the screen.
Most subjects watching the video accurately counted the number of passes, but half of them completely missed the gorilla. It was, as the testers explained, as though the gorilla was invisible.
The experiment became the genesis for best-selling book titled, The Invisible Gorilla: and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.[vii] The authors maintain that people do, in fact, miss much of what goes on in the visual world, while at the same time overestimating their mental abilities and capacities. “…It is kind of a self-delusion,” they write, “but without knowing that you’re doing anything to delude yourself. Such delusions can lead people to do dangerous things with a false sense of security, such as (texting) while driving.”[viii]
And the problem is not limited to cell phones. It can be a matter of being lost in thought: thinking about unfinished projects at work or at school. Or what you’re going to be doing when you get home.
According to Chabris and Simons, “The error of perception results from a lack of attention to an unexpected object. When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.”[ix]
On this commencement day, it is my good wish that your experiences and education here have broadened your worldview, taught you to consider multiple perspectives, and demonstrated the wisdom of giving a thing a second and maybe even a third look.
[i] Steel, John, Truth, Likes and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning, John Wiley & Sons, February 1998
[ii] Steel, Ibid
[iii] Steel, Ibid
[iv] Steel, Ibid
[v] Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, Crown, New York, 2010, p. ix & x)
[vii] Chabris, Christopher; Simons, Daniel. “The Invisible Gorilla: and Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us.” 2009. Crown Publishing Group, Random House Inc. New York, N.Y.
[viii] Chabris, Ibid, p. 6 & 7
[ix] Chabris, Ibid, p. 7
- Topic Category: Commencement Address
- Tags: [inattentional blindness, perspective, strangeness of familiar]
- Filed in: Speeches,