Nudge

Recognition

Seeing depends on recognition. We need to have seen something before to know what we’re looking for, to lock on to the sense of known. Even when we can’t identify something right away there can be a feeling of familiarity that draws focus. After more than a decade since neuroscience’s discovery of the importance of feelings to thinking, it is finally being acknowledged in media. Feelings come first, providing incentives regarding what needs attention. Feelings accompany vision as an initial assessment of what we’re seeing. They are far more nuanced than words can express, think how many different ways a beautiful day or a wild ocean can look. If we’re looking at another person, the inner mirroring of face and body language help us feel what another is experiencing. Besides our experience of our surroundings, we have art to show the deep movements of the heart. Artists throughout time have shown what’s it’s like to be human, to appreciate beauty, shudder at horror and gasp at what’s ugly beyond human understanding. Art is our vehicle to witness what’s not within our own experience and enlarge our understanding of feeling and intuitive judgment. Looking at the art that attracts you trains that sensitivity. Building faith in our response to what we see can strengthen our moral judgments to hold up against the flood of verbal justification. Realizing the importance of visual judgments could guide us in better understanding what is happening in our world. Vision shows what’s harmonious, what’s in conflict, where something valued has been defiled. Many of us felt heartsick at the demolition of the east wing of the White House, a place that belonged to the country, not an individual, and provides a recent example of how what is wrong is felt. The machine bites off a piece of building we care about and we feel it in our chest. Likewise, we recoil at human beings being thrown to the ground, treated with disrespect and carted off to cages. Destroying small boats and the people in them without evidence of wrongdoing is another ugly scene in our current reality horror show. The words and explanations don’t carry the weight of witnessing and feeling the truth of what we see. Understanding how powerful our vision is in seeing right and wrong, goodness and cruelty, comes with the responsibility to look. In a world full of distractions, it’s too easy to ignore what’s actually happening around us. Making decisions about where to give our attention is the first step in active awareness.