DAY 29 OF 30 OF THE JUNE DEEP THOUGHT WRITING CHALLENGE

Is Perception Universal or Are We Conditioned by Our Culture?

Even something as simple as color can be viewed differently. Is anything truly universal?

How do you know what colors look like to someone else? If I point to something and say, “That’s blue” and you agree with me, it’s simply because we’ve both been taught that what we’re looking at is CALLED blue — but maybe what I call blue actually looks like what you call red. (This question isn’t completely about color, it’s about perception — how do we ever know if perception is universal?) Explain.

As I’m thinking about this prompt and the question posed here, I feel like I might have to walk back some previous statements that I’ve made in this deep-thought challenge before. I think that it’s okay to get to a point when you examine your own perceptions and opinions about things and alter them a bit. I made a mistake before and I’m just constantly learning.

With that being said, perception is not universal. It really does depend on how you were raised, what society and culture have conditioned you to believe, and how to think. Also, there may be things within a person that changes the way they see the world.

There are many neurodivergent people in the world who see the world differently. Not just my partner who is on the autism spectrum. But also people who can’t see faces. Also, my partner. And then there are people who see colors when they hear music.

Then there are people who have certain color blindness. Some cultural differences that can shape our perception can be the way certain words are used in language. Our primary language is the very lens that we perceive much of the world around us.

There are languages that have multiple words for important things in their culture. In the Yupik/Inuit language, there are 40–50 words for the word “snow” alone. Language definitely shapes the way we think through the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

That isn’t even considering different subgroups and subcultures within the same lands that have different views of the world in general. There are many people in the world that believe that the world is flat. That’s actually how they view the world around them.

Imagine believing something that has already been factually disproven. It’s insane the lengths that the human mind will go to try to make certain things seem real. There are so many different ways to perceive the same phenomenon.

I think that is why so many people disagree on things that have already been scientifically proven like the world being round or that the climate is effectively changing and rising the temperature of the planet.

There are definitely people who think that this is just a cyclical change that will self-correct. That may have been true in the past but this recent change has definitely been affected by human activity and that’s hard for some people to perceive.

Then all of this difference in perception leaks into every imaginable subject in everyday life. It’s also a phenomenon that partly explains why people are more inclined to believe that Trump can do no wrong when all of the evidence is there. They see a charismatic figure who could lead them all into the sea off a cliff and they will dogmatically follow him there because their perception of reality is linked to every word he says. Anyway, I digress.

The point is, you’ll probably never get everyone to agree on everything and that is linked to how different people perceive reality differently, and in some cases and through my earlier examples, much differently. I think that if we understand each other’s differences more than making others feel bad for being different, then we can find common ground again.

There are some opinions and perceptions of reality that are irreconcilable and unforgivable, though, but those are the ones mostly fueled by hate, and I don’t think anyone outside of those groups would even want to have anything to do or try to understand those perceptions at all.

Challenge Community Group: Autistic Widower (“AJ”), Brett Jenae Tomlin, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, Trisha Faye, Karen Schwartz, NancyO, Katie Michaelson, Bernie Pullen, Michelle Jimerson Morris, Amy Frances, Julia A. Keirns, Ravyne Hawke, Pamela Oglesby, Harry Hogg, Tina, Pat Romito LaPointe, Brandon Ellrich, Misty Rae, Karen Hoffman, Susie Winfield, Vincent Pisano, Marlene Samuels, Ray Day, Randy Pulley, Michael Rhodes, Lu Skerdoo, Pluto Wolnosci, Paula Shablo, Bruce Coulter, Ellen Baker, Leigh-Anne Dennison, Jennifer Marla Pike, Carmen Ballesteros, Patricia Timmermans, Keeley Schroder, Jerry Dwyer, Teisha LeShea, and Ruby Noir