In the chapters that follow, I explain how knowing when to narrow our focus of attention helps us to exercise more effectively, save more for retirement sooner, and find more time in our day to do what we really want to. Understanding how to materialize a goal, our steps, or our efforts improves the way we track our progress. Becoming aware of the power of framing can improve our ability to read others’ emotions, negotiate better deals, improve the relationships we have with other people, and overcome a fear of public speaking. And a wide bracket reduces the allure of temptations, the appeal of multitasking, and the inclination to push on when changing course might be best.
We can think of these strategies as four different tools in a toolbox we select from when working on a self-improvement project. Consider them your hammer, screwdriver, wrench, and pliers—pretty basic implements, but useful for almost every job. Sometimes the goals we set require us to use multiple strategies, just as any home repair may require more than one tool. Sometimes what we’ve set our sights on can be accomplished with one plan but not another, so having options for how to get the job done can be beneficial—just as a fully stocked toolbox offers us the possibility of trading in a screwdriver for a wrench when the first choice isn’t right.
Interestingly, these four strategies share one feature: they are all about harnessing the power of our eyes. Challenging ourselves to quite literally look differently can help us better our odds of succeeding at things that don’t seem related to vision at all. I recently set my sights on learning to play one particular song on the drums. (I had my own reasons for wanting to do this, which I’ll get to shortly.) I found that using the strategies I study in my professional life helped me persevere despite the difficulties I knew I’d experience in learning to lay down a beat—as well as those I hadn’t even anticipated.
In telling you about my own use of these concepts, I hope that you, too, will be able to look at the world—and what you hope to accomplish in it—in new, creative, and better ways. By investigating the what, why, when, and how of these strategies, I have learned that we can teach ourselves to truly see life from a different perspective. We can take control of our own perception. We can direct our eyes to see in ways that promote good fortune, and to avoid seeing in ways that don’t. If we take advantage of our visual experiences, we might see our way to happier, healthier, and more productive lives every day.
Indeed, it is my hope that when you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll be able to envision new paths forward and different perspectives. It’s not only about winning gold medals and making more money, though I’ll cover those things too. With more insight into your perceptual experience, you’ll obtain a better understanding of your life’s objectives, how far you’ve come, how far you have to go, and how you can get there more quickly. You’ll also have a better handle on why other people may earnestly believe they’ve seen something you don’t see, and you’ll understand how that impacts the ways in which you pursue success. Once you understand when and how vision is biased, you can learn to use those biases in your favor, and to counteract them when necessary.
There is no one right way to see the world, and this book will respect that. Instead, the work I share with you aspires to offer suggestions for improving how you confront challenges by building up the cache of resources at your disposal. I’ll give you a set of powerful and largely untapped perceptual tactics you can use to create and sustain views of yourself, others, and your environments that will help you see the possibilities in what you can’t see now. To do this, I’ll draw from research that sits at the intersection of social psychology and visual perception. My work, and that of others I draw from, taps into the neurobiological nature of the human visual system, which is itself a kind of interdepartmental collaboration between the eyes and the brain. When we understand the scientific basis for how we perceive the world around us, the path to most goals becomes clearer, success looks closer, and the process feels better.
Seeing a New Way Forward
One summer, my research team asked more than 1,400 men and women from sixteen countries which one of their five senses they would least like to lose. Which would be the most difficult to live without if it were taken away? Regardless of where they were from, their age, or their gender, seven out of every ten people said that losing their sense of sight would be the worst. The majority thought that they couldn’t live without vision. But actually, they could.
Let’s take a step back and make sure we’re on the same page with some of the fundamentals of vision science. We experience the sense of sight because of the connection our eyes have with our brains. We pick up on the brightness of the sun or register the hue of the sky with our eyes, but we only really experience seeing once our brains translate those sensations into something meaningful. Consider the following example. Linseed oil, mineral salts, bristle brushes, linen, and wood are products in their own right, but only when Claude Monet combined them in the right proportions and manner were we able to see the water lilies he painted outside his home in Giverny.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, and he’s famous for discovering what happens in our brains when we lose our sense of sight. He found that the visual cortex—the part of the brain at the back of our head that specializes in making sense of the signals the eyes send it—is incredibly quick to retool when something changes in how our eyes operate. He invited people with normal vision to experience life without sight for five days. The volunteers wore blindfolds. These weren’t the kind you get in your travel kit when you fly internationally. They were high-tech and lined with photographic paper that would react to light exposure, so the researchers would know that none of the volunteers had seen the light of day (or bulb) since putting them on.
Pascual-Leone and his colleagues used the five days of blindness as an opportunity to teach basic Braille. The volunteers learned that the Braille alphabet is derived from bumps that protrude in various places on a two-by-three grid. The letter A feels like a dot popping up in the upper left corner of this grid. B feels like A but with the addition of the left-side dot in the middle row. The volunteers trained their index finger to feel the differences in where the bumps were and how many appeared at once. By the end of the five days, they weren’t reading Shakespeare with their fingertips, but they had the basic alphabet down.
Each day, the researchers also invited the volunteers to lie down in an fMRI machine that would make a movie of what happened in their brains when they read Braille. On the first day, their brains were most active in the somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for what we touch and feel; their visual cortex did nothing in response to feeling the Braille letters. But by the end of the five days of having no sight, this pattern had reversed: the somatosensory cortex responded less, and the visual cortex responded more, when the volunteers felt the Braille letters. In other words, the work their fingers were doing was now registering in the part of the brain that for its whole life had been responsible for actual seeing. In less than one week, the visual cortex adapted and repurposed itself to reflect what happens in the brains of truly blind people who are proficient in reading Braille—the visual centers in the brain registered what their fingers were “seeing.”