The Strange Prism of Perception
Today, we take a parabolic dissecting view of perception.
There’s something uncannily elusive about the way we see the world. Not in the literal, optical sense, but in the way life bends itself around our perceptions. How it refracts through our histories and quietly takes shape in the dark hollows of memory and emotion.
Every person walks around within a cocoon of assumptions, projections, and half-truths woven from a peculiar blend of their experiences, traumas, delights, and fears. And yet we speak with such conviction as though clarity were a shared currency.
Psychologists call this “cognitive bias,” but that term feels sterile. Almost too neat. Biases aren’t just flaws in our mental machinery: they are, in many ways, the architecture of our understanding. The confirmation bias, for instance, doesn’t merely cause us to favour information that supports our preexisting beliefs. Rather, it builds cathedrals out of that information.
We look for what fits, and discard what jostles our narratives. Not because we’re irrational, but because the brain, burdened by complexity, craves coherence.
But how coherent can life be when two people remember the same event with wildly different emotional weather? A child recalls their father’s silence at dinner as brooding disapproval. The father, meanwhile, was quietly carrying the weight of losing his job. Memory is not a camera; it is a sculptor. And sculptors leave fingerprints. All these contribute to our perception of life.
Take the fundamental attribution error as a case study. When others falter, we blame their character; when we falter, we blame our circumstances. She’s late because she’s irresponsible. I’m late because traffic was hell.
This mental skewness gives us a neat boundary between self and other. It is our comfortable way of preserving ego and stability. But in doing so, we inadvertently create caricatures of the people around us. We look at them as flat, predictable figures that fit into our internal dramas.
What makes this even more fascinating and frustrating at the same time is that we are rarely aware of these processes. Most of what influences our judgment operates below the level of consciousness.
Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, distinguishes between System 1 and System 2 thinking. The first is fast, intuitive and emotional; the second is slow, deliberate and analytical. System 1 gets the steering wheel more often than we’d like to admit. It draws from the murky reservoir of personal experience and cultural sediment to make quick, confident decisions. Confident, we suppose.
System 2, though smarter, is lazy and only kicks in when absolutely necessary, and even then, often just rationalises what System 1 has already decided. Interestingly, I must say.
Our Thinking Angles
Our thinking angles (the directions from which we approach problems or people) are thus deeply tamed by mood, context, and even time of day. A hungry person sees negotiation differently than a gorged one. A lonely heart interprets silence as rejection; a secure one might see it as peace.
In this sense, “objectivity” becomes something of a mirage. We can strive for it, perhaps even approximate it, but we are always perched inside the apparatus of our mind. That is, our perceptions and biases.
Consider the personal experience of grief. For some, it makes them more compassionate, aware of the hidden sorrows in others. For others, it hardens the shell and life becomes brittle, with trust rationed. Same human event, two radically different outlooks. Our emotional responses encode themselves in our worldview, and over time, those responses become the lens through which we interpret even unrelated events.
There is something tragic and beautiful in this. It means no two people truly inhabit the same world, even when standing side by side. When a couple argues about “what really happened,” they’re not just fighting over facts—they’re battling over competing emotional realities. And neither is necessarily wrong. The human mind does not record data. It records significance.
Culture’s Influence on our Perceptions
Add to this the subtle influences of culture, language, and upbringing, and you start to wonder how any two people manage to understand each other at all. In some East Asian cultures, for instance, the emphasis is on context and harmony. Truth is not a sharp line, but a dance of considerations.
In Western cultures, directness is esteemed. A person who hedges their opinion is seen as evasive. Put the two mindsets in the same conversation, and misunderstandings multiply not because of ill will, but because of misaligned perceptual defaults.
Yet even awareness of this complexity doesn’t grant immunity. It can breed a strange kind of unsteadiness. If my thoughts are shaped by invisible forces, how much of me is truly me? If I cannot disentangle my assumptions from my identity, then what does it mean to change my mind? Is it betrayal? Is it growth? Or is it weakness?
Perhaps this is where humility finds its footing. Not in surrendering the right to speak or judge, but in recognising the limits of our vision. The eye, after all, has a blind spot. So does the self.
Imagine walking into a room full of strangers. You assume who might be interesting, who might be arrogant, and who is likely to agree with you. Based on what? Posture, expression, accent, clothing. Snap judgments, all of them.
Maybe you’re right. More likely, you’re projecting some hidden fragment of your past onto people who know nothing of it. A gruff voice reminds you of an old teacher who shamed you in school. That association, fleeting, unacknowledged, paints your whole interaction.
And so, we carry ourselves through life, misreading and being misread, learning (hopefully) to pause, to wonder what we’re missing. Not just in others, but in ourselves.
In the end, perhaps perception is not meant to be precise. Maybe it’s magic lies in its mutability. The way we see anew when something inside us shifts. It’s a quiet invitation, whispered beneath all our certainty and whole being: look again. And maybe again.
Only then, maybe, can we see the details in art, of the veil in front of us.
