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.