Understanding Our Environment: A Journey into Perception and Awareness

As humans, we know a remarkably large amount of what’s going on around us. We see everything, hear everything, taste everything, smell everything and feel everything. So why don’t we observe everything?

Think back to the last time you went to a supermarket. If you went in for some apples, you’re probably fully aware of how much the apples were, how many they had, and which type had any special offers on them. But what about the peaches? Did they have any? Or oranges? It is likely you saw the peaches and oranges on the shelf, but knowing anything about them held no value to you, so your brain ignored the information. This happens routinely, every single day.

This model by Wickens et al (2013) is a great visual aid for showing what happens when our senses sense the world around us.

We have our primary, traditional senses, which are the ones we all know and love – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, but there are others too. For example, nociception is the sense of pain (though this could be argued to be the same as touch, but if your internal body organs hurt, is that touch in the traditional sense?) and equilibrioception is the sense of balance. There are several others, but the point is this. We are sensing hundreds of ‘things’ every second, though we don’t necessarily perceive them all.

Perception is Key

This is where attention comes into play. There are several theories around attention, however many point towards the concept that it is a finite resource. Even for the greatest multi-tasker, there is a limit to how many senses, or information, we can pay attention to at any one time. Think about when you’re trying to find somewhere to park your car in a busy car park. You turn the radio down to help you see better. How does that make sense?! You’re instinctively reducing the sensory inputs (sound) so that your finite attention resources can focus on finding a space (sight).

Once our minds have perceived the sense, it can then feed into our central processing. Here’s where our decision making takes place, fed by our memories of pre-conceptions, knowledge and past experiences.

Understanding how we perceive the world can help us to perform better day-to-day. If you remember that your attention resources are finite, be sure to allocate them appropriately. Tunnel vision can occur when you get too task-focussed, so considering that there may be some information around that you aren’t seeing (or hearing, smelling, feeling, etc) because you think you have the whole picture. It is important to review regularly; this helps us to check in with our decision making, that our memories aren’t entirely ruling the roost and we are perceiving the world around us as accurately as we can.

Biases will be looked at on their own in a separate topic, as these can creep in and affect our decision making too!