Most people, if given the opportunity, will misidentify suspects, as has been proven in innumerable college psychology experiments. One reason for this is general reluctance to be different from the herd, which leads to a willingness to change one's story after hearing what the other witnesses have said. But in the words of S.I. Hayakawa, "If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it."
The human eye and mind work together to disillusion you. You see something happen, so you try to put the two of them together. Nine times out of ten the camera makes a liar out of you. The mind can see things only so far as our eyes will let it. ( R. Wayne Anderson)
The eyes can see things only so far as the mind lets them, and sometimes this truth appears in astonishing ways. The eminent chanteuse Edith Piaf suffered for many years from hysterical blindness because of abuse. Many Cambodian women who have escaped to the United States are blind. Their characteristics don't match up with the personality profiles typical of hysterical blindness. Nor are they overbred neurasthenic fainting violet types. They are sturdy peasants. Yet they are undoubtedly blind because of what they have seen in their homeland.
Depth, degree, and direction of vision are other subjective variables. Trained seers see more, as Virginia Woolf implies in stating that the poets and novelists are the only people from whom we cannot hide. Tom Robbins defines poetry as "nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power...."
"We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon." (Konrad Adenauer). We are all lying in the gutter, one of the French poets said, but some of us are looking at the stars. Carl Sagan points out that from the point of view of a mayfly, "human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously...."
to Vision 6
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