Full text of communication scholar Sean Tiffee’s talk titled “Mind the Gap Between Perception and Reality” at TEDxLSCTomball conference.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Tiffee – Communication scholar
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a short one. I promise. What I want you to do is I want you to picture it in your mind, as I tell it, okay.
Bob went to the beach to play fetch with his dog as it. I told you it was short, but here’s my question for you when you pictured it in your mind, what kind of dog did Bob have? Now, what the research says is you probably pictured one of three dogs. Either one, you pictured your dog two, you pictured a Labrador retriever or three, you pictured a golden retriever.
And the reality is that kind of makes sense, right? Maybe you pictured your dog because, well, when you think dog, that’s the reference point you have for dog. But the research says if you didn’t picture yours, you probably pictured a Labrador retriever or a golden retriever. Why?
Well, kind of makes sense, because I told you that he went to the beach to play fetch with his dog and what a Labrador retrievers do; what a golden retrievers do? It’s right there in the name. They retrieve things. So if you went to play fetch, that’s what he brought.
There’s a concept in rhetorical studies called linguistic or listening fidelity. And what listening fidelity is it’s how close did I get with my message to what you pictured in your head? Now you pictured a golden retriever. Bob doesn’t have a golden retriever. Nope. Bob has a mixed breed. It’s half Wolf, half Chihuahua. It’s a Wolf Wawa. That’s what he’s got.
But you didn’t picture that.
No, no, no, you didn’t. There’s a gap between what you pictured and what he’s got. There’s a gap between perception and between reality. I first started thinking about the gap and this idea of a gap.
When I spent time in London and I went to the London underground, which is just a fancy European way of saying subway. And I saw signs everywhere. They reminded me to mind the gap. Now here, they’re talking about the platform and the train. There’s a little spot there and they don’t want you to twist your ankle or anything, which is smart.
I think that there’s a lot of good advice that’d be had in train stations. In Japan, for example, you might see a sign that says, take care of head and that’s smart, but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about now is the gap.
You should mind the gap because between perception and between the reality, there’s a gap.
Those gaps can be dangerous. My twisted ankle might do more harm. I’ve heard someone else. So let’s talk for a minute about the dangers of the gap and maybe what we can do to overcome those dangers.
There’s a South Asian parable that you might have heard before. It’s where a series of blind men are able to get experienced to an elephant. They’ve never experienced an elephant before. And then they’re asked to describe what an elephant is, but each one of the men is only allowed a certain part to the elephant.
So one of the blind men touches the side of the elephant, right? He’s like, “Oh, I know what an elephant is like, it’s like a wall.” Another gets access to the leg. He’s like, “no, no, no, no elephant, It’s like pillar” or the tail, says, “no, it’s like a rope or the tub, it’s a pipe.”
And the point of course here is that none of the blind men by themselves really understand what an elephant is. Because they only have kind of a limited perspective. They have limited access to what the elephant is. There’s a gap. There’s a gap between perception and between reality.
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And a rhetorical studies again, there are theorists who talk about this gap between perception and between reality. And what they say is that we all experienced the gap because when we’re born, we are born into a series of cultural narratives or master narratives. So theorists like Kenneth Burke or theorist, like Edmund black, say that when we are born into stories that precede us, these giant master narratives that we take these cultural narratives, this rhetoric of narrative, and we then spin out our own personal stories through it. And your personal stories oftentimes are reflective of the master narratives that you are born into.
Altuve’s era says that we are hailed by ideology. That again is the perception that you’re born into, which then is separate and distinct from reality. And what do we have to do? Well, we must always mind the gap.
Virtually every discipline talks about the gap. In one way or another, they all see it. They all perceive it. They’ll know it’s there. Even in the hard sciences with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we can know one thing without having to know another, there’s a gap in what we have access to and what we can know. In rhetorical studies, It’s the master narrative versus your personal stories, all those things. They’re also very, very careful that we have to be able to mind the gap.
But that doesn’t always sit really well with me. Because if we mind the gap, we are aware, there’s a difference between perception and between reality, it seems to suggest that we can have access at some point to reality.
So in some versions that South Asian parable, there’s another man who walks up and says, here is what the elephant looks like and describes for each of the men. Here is what the elephant looks like in its totality. Of course, the man who walks up is deaf. So he’ll never hear the elephant bellow… can’t have access to reality.
So I don’t like this idea of minding the gap. Rather, I want to do something different. I want to mine the gap because I think there’s something there that we can get out of the gap that can help us avoid that danger. And it’s going to sound silly and it’s going to sound absurd, but I also think it’ll work.
What can we do to mine the gap, as opposed to mind that the gap?
One of my favourite films is from 1993, it’s a film called “Falling Down”. Stars – Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. And in it, Michael Douglas is a man who rails against what he believes to be the absurd.
So ultimately what happens is he goes into a fast food restaurant and he wants to get breakfast and its 10:35.Oh yeah, you see where this is going. It’s 10:35. And he wants breakfast, but they stopped serving at 10:30. And they say, “I’m sorry, they can’t.” And he says, “but I can see right there, you have breakfast still under the heat lamps. Just serve me that”. And they say, “We can’t against the rules”.
So what happens in this film, it’s kind of a sad tale. Actually is he has a break and he snaps and he begins railing against the absurd. He begins railing against what he believes to be the reality as it exists.
But what he’s really railing against is his own perception. And that’s the danger of the gap, which is that if you believe that you have access to reality, at some point, you think you can get a monopoly on truth. Now I said that from these master narratives, you spit out your own personal stories and you do.
But when those personal stories, you believe to be the only representation of reality in my own personal story, in my own personal movie, I’m always the hero. And if my perception of reality is different from yours and I’m the hero, then you’ve got to be the villain. And if you’re the villain that I fight against you, the difference between perception and between a reality, if my perception is different from yours and I’m right, then you’re wrong.
But in falling down at the very end of the film, spoiler alert, the very end of the film, Michael Douglas is standing there. And Robert Duvall as the cop who’s been chased on the whole time. He has a gun pointed at him and Michael Douglas has this revelation. He says, “Wait, I’m the bad guy?”
Yeah. We don’t ever kind of come to that realization because we’re always the hero. Because we think we have a monopoly on truth, because we think that we know what reality is. So how do we mind the gap to avoid that from happening… from kind of hardening into that nodal point where we have reality and we alone have it?
Be absurd. Instead of Michael Douglas railing against what he perceives to be absurd, I want you to embrace the absurd listening fidelity, the Wolf wah-wah. You pictured a dog that was not a Wolf Wah-wah. You know what you didn’t picture. I know you didn’t picture this. You didn’t picture a dump truck.
I think maybe you kind of should. So let’s do my little story again. And this time I want you to not picture a dog. I want you to picture a dump truck. Bob went to the beach to play fetch with his dog. Now you pictured a dump truck at the beach. It’s absurd.
But the reality is this, that dump truck is just a placeholder. Just like the golden retriever you pictured was just a placeholder. The dump truck is just a place holder. So you still got the context of the story. You still understand… we’re still communicating.
You still understand what I’m trying to say. The difference is that there is this glaring point in your mind that is absurd. That is a constant reminder to you that you are only seeing the world through your individual perceptions because that’s all we’re ever able to do.
And when there’s a constant reminder that all I’m doing is perceiving the world my way, not the real way, just my way, then I can have empathy for others. I still don’t have access to reality because none of us ever do, but I’m more empathetic.
There is a gap between perception and reality, but there’s something very, very special in the middle… in that gap.
There’s also a pretty big gap between a Wolf and a Chihuahua, but when those two things come together, something special can happen too. That’s what I want for you. Embrace the absurd. Be the Wolf wah-wah.
