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DISTORTED THINKING

Discover and change the following 15 types of distorted thinking

• 1. Tunnel vision Example: ‘I expect it’ll be another boring party’. It is being stuck in a mental groove. In particular you look for that which confirms your fear or prejudice, remember it from the past and expect it in the future. You ignore other points of view or the possibility of alternative solutions.

• 2. Awfulizing Example: ‘I can’t bear going on these awful buses’. This attitude is saying that it’s unacceptable if things aren’t as you would prefer them to be. You take the negative aspect of a situation and magnify it. To handle this, recognize when you use words like terrible, awful, disgusting, etc. and in particular the phrase ‘I can’t stand it’. Examine their rationality.

• 3. Black & White Thinking Example: ‘You’re either for me or against me’. Things are black or white, wonderful or terrible, a great success or a total failure, brilliantly clever or really stupid, a certainty or a complete mystery, friend or enemy, love or hate - there is no middle ground, no room for improvement, no room for mistakes. Judgments on self and others swing from one emotional extreme to another and are easily triggered. It is important to remember that human beings are just too complex to be reduced to dichotomous judgments, and that all qualities fall somewhere along a continuum, containing elements of either extreme.

• 4. Generalization Example: ‘I’ll never be any good at tennis’ after one poor game. In this distortion you make a broad, generalized conclusion, often couched in the form of absolute statements, based on a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. If someone shows evidence of a negative trait, this is picked up on and exaggerated into a global judgment. This inevitably leads to a more and more restricted life and your view of the world becomes stereotyped. Cue words that indicate you may be over-generalizing are: all, every, none, never, always, everybody and nobody. To become more flexible use words such as: may, sometimes and often, and be particularly sensitive to absolute statements about the future, such as ‘No one will ever love me’, because they may become self-fulfilling prophecies.

• 5. Assumption Example: ‘Nothing can change the way I feel’. Making an assumption, presupposes knowledge that you do not have. Assumptions are often popular beliefs that have been adopted without examining their basis in fact, such as ‘I’m over the hill now that I’m forty’. Making decisions based on assumptions may lead to disaster, as when an executive assumes that a new product will sell well, having made no market research. Often, taking things for granted causes people to be blind to possible solutions - assuming no-one can help them, a couple’s marriage may go on the rocks, when they could seek counseling. Question: what leads you to believe this? Why do it this way? Who says? What alternatives are there? What would happen if you did? What would happen if you didn’t? As a practical matter, all of us must proceed with the business of living by relying on ‘maps’ of the world which we have taken on trust and which we have not tested and often cannot test. To supplement personal experience, we absorb a constant stream of reports, descriptions, judgments, inferences and assumptions coming from a multitude of sources. From this abundance of stored information, you piece together a mental ‘model’ of the world and its workings that literally becomes your world view. However, people do vary considerably in the extent of their misinformation and in the degree to which they actively seek out new information, take opportunities to correct or update their mental models, and expose themselves to new experiences.

• 6. Projection Example: ‘I know he doesn’t like me’. Making false assumptions about what other people think depends on a process called projection. It is like mind-reading – putting words into peoples’ mouths. You imagine that people feel the same way you do and react to things the same way. If you get angry when someone is late, you assume that another will feel the same way about you or others, in that situation. If you don’t like yourself, you assume others also think that way. The answer is not to jump to conclusions about what other people think and feel.

• 7. Negative thinking Example: ‘We haven’t seen each other for two days - I think the relationship is falling apart’. You read a newspaper article about some misfortune and wonder if that could happen to you. Predicting negative consequences is a defense, to protect oneself from disappointment by expecting the worst. Consider, what are the realistic odds of that happening?

• 8. Self-consciousness Example: ‘Quite a few people here seem smarter than I am’. This is the introverted tendency to relate everything around you to yourself, to think people must be judging you, or to think that everything they do or say is a reaction to something about you. It is the habit of continually comparing yourself to other people, based on the underlying assumption is that your worth is questionable. You are therefore continually forced to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. If you come out better you have a moment’s relief; if you come up short, you feel diminished. Your worth doesn’t depend on being better than others, so why start the comparison gamble?

• 9. Blame Example: ‘It’s your fault we’re in debt’. If you see yourself as externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate or ‘the system’. You don’t believe you can really affect the basic shape of your life, let alone make any difference in the world, so you try and manipulate others to take care of your interests. Someone else is to blame and is responsible for your pain, your loss, your failure. The truth is that we are constantly making decisions and every decision affects and steers our lives. It is your responsibility to assert your needs, to say no or go elsewhere for what you want. In some way we are responsible for nearly everything that happens to us, including our distress and unhappiness. Taking responsibility means accepting the consequences of your own choices. Ask yourself: ‘What choices have I made that resulted in this situation? What decisions can I now make to change it?’ The opposite distortion is also very common - the fallacy that makes you responsible for the pain or happiness of everyone around you. You carry the world on your shoulders. You have to right all wrongs, fill every need and balm each hurt; if you don’t you feel guilty and turn the blame on yourself. Blaming yourself means labeling yourself inadequate if things go wrong. With this viewpoint you are very easily manipulated. The key to overcoming this fallacy is to recognize that each person is responsible for himself - taking responsibility doesn’t imply that you are also responsible for what happens to others. Remember, part of respecting others includes respecting their ability to overcome or accept their own pains, make their own decisions and be in control of their own lives.

• 10. Unfairness Example: ‘It’s not fair, he should take me out more often’. The consideration of unfairness results from resentment that the other person does not want or prefer the same as you, or that events do not turn out in your favor. The person gets locked into his or her own point of view, with a feeling of ever-growing resentment. Be honest with yourself and the other person. Say what you want or prefer, without getting involved in the fallacy of unfairness: that people and situations shouldn’t be the way they are.

• 11. Emotional reasoning Example: ‘I feel depressed, life must be pointless’. You believe that what you feel must be true - automatically. If you feel stupid then you must lack intelligence. If you feel guilty then you must have done something wrong. If you feel angry, someone must have taken advantage of you. However, there is nothing automatically true about what you feel - your feelings can lie to you, they can be based on misconceptions. If your feelings are based on distorted thoughts, then they won’t have any validity. So be skeptical about your feelings and examine them as you would a used car.

• 12. Manipulation Example: ‘If we had sex more often, I’d be more affectionate’. The only person you can really control or have much hope of changing is yourself. When you pressure people to change, you are forcing them to be different for your own benefit. Strategies for manipulating others include blaming, demanding, withholding and trading - in order to make the other feel obliged. The usual result is that the other person feels attacked or pushed around and resists changing at all, or feels resentful if they do. The underlying fallacy of this thinking style is that your happiness depends on controlling the behavior of others. In fact your happiness depends on the many thousands of large and small decisions you make during your life.

• 13. Shoulds Example: ‘You should never ask people personal questions’. In this distortion, you operate from a list of inflexible rules about how you and other people should act. The rules are right and indisputable. Any particular deviation from your particular values or standards is bad. As a result you are often in the position of judging and finding fault. People irritate you, they don’t act properly or think correctly. They have unacceptable traits, habits and opinions that make them hard to tolerate. They should know the rules and they should follow them. Of course, the answer is to focus on each person’s uniqueness: his or her particular needs, limitations, fears and pleasures, and consequently different values. Personal values are just that - personal. You are also making yourself suffer with shoulds, oughts and musts (or their negatives). You feel compelled to do something or be a certain way and feel guilty if you don’t, but you never bother to ask objectively if it really makes sense. Some people beat themselves up constantly for being incompetent, insensitive, stupid, too emotional, etc. They are always ready to be wrong. The psychiatrist Karen Horney called this the ‘tyranny of the shoulds’.

• 14. Got to be right Example: ‘I’ve been doing this longer than you, so I know what I’m talking about’. In this distortion you are usually on the defensive, needing to prove to yourself and others that your views, assumptions and actions are all correct. You never make mistakes! If you’ve got to be right, you don’t listen. You can’t afford to – listening might reveal that you are wrong sometimes. Your opinions rarely change because if the facts don’t fit what you already believe you ignore them. This makes you lonely, because being right seems more important than an honest, caring relationship. The key to overcoming being right, is active listening - making sure you really understand what’s been said to you, to appreciate the other’s point of view and what you can learn from it, which is effort better spent than in devising rebuttals and attacks. Remember that other people believe what they are saying as strongly as you do, and there is not always just the one right answer.

• 15. Heaven’s reward Example: ‘I worked and raised these kids and look what thanks I get’. This distorted thinking style accepts pain and unhappiness because ‘those who do good are rewarded in the end’. You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there was someone keeping score. You feel hostile and bitter when the reward doesn’t come. In reality the reward is now. Your relationship, your progress toward your goals, and the care you give to those you love, should be intrinsically rewarding. If not, you need to rearrange your activities to provide some here-and now reward, dropping or sharing the activities that chronically drain you - Heaven is a long way off and you can get very tired waiting. The best way to practice identifying Thought Distortions in everyday life, is to take particular notice of one of the distortions for one day, and notice whenever it is used - by others or by yourself! Frequently, several Distortions are combined in a statement, or a statement fits into several categories of Distortion.

Different Types of Thinking

• 1. Critical thinking - This is convergent thinking. It assesses the worth and validity of something existent. It involves precise, persistent, objective analysis. When teachers try to get several learners to think convergently, they try to help them develop common understanding.

• 2. Creative thinking - This is divergent thinking. It generates something new or different. It involves having a different idea that works as well or better than previous ideas.

• 3. Convergent thinking - This type of thinking is cognitive processing of information around a common point, an attempt to bring thoughts from different directions into a union or common conclusion.

• 4. Divergent thinking - This type of thinking starts from a common point and moves outward into a variety of perspectives. When fosering divergent thinking, teachers use the content as a vehicle to prompt diverse or unique thinking among students rather than a common view.

• 5. Inductive thinking - This is the process of reasoning from parts to the whole, from examples to generalizations.

• 6. Deductive thinking - This type of reasoning moves from the whole to its parts, from generalizations to underlying concepts to examples.

• 7. Closed questions - These are questions asked by teachers that have predictable responses. Closed questions almost always require factual recall rather than higher levels of thinking.

• 8. Open questions - These are questions that do not have predictable answers. Open questions almost always require higher order thinking.

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY

By John L. Esposito and John O. Voll

• The relationship between Islam and democracy in the contemporary world is complex. The Muslim world is not ideologically monolithic. It presents a broad spectrum of perspectives ranging from the extremes of those who deny a connection between Islam and democracy to those who argue that Islam requires a democratic system. In between the extremes, in a number of countries where Muslims are a majority, many Muslims believe that Islam is a support for democracy even though their particular political system is not explicitly defined as Islamic.

• Throughout the Muslim world in the twentieth century, many groups that identify themselves explicitly as Islamic attempted to participate directly in the democratic processes as regimes were overthrown in Eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. In Iran such groups controlled and defined the system as a whole; in other areas, the explicitly Islamic groups were participating in systems that were more secular in structure.

• The participation of self-identified Islamically oriented groups in elections, and in democratic processes in general, aroused considerable controversy. People who believe that secular approaches and a separation of religion and politics are an essential part of democracy argue that Islamist groups only advocate democracy as a tactic to gain political power. They say Islamist groups support “one man, one vote, one time.” In Algeria and Turkey, following electoral successes by parties thought to be religiously threatening to the existing political regimes, the Islamic political parties were restricted legally or suppressed.

• The relationship between Islam and democracy is strongly debated among the people who identify with the Islamic resurgence in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Some of these Islamists believe that “democracy” is a foreign concept that has been imposed by Westernizers and secular reformers upon Muslim societies. They often argue that the concept of popular sovereignty denies the fundamental Islamic affirmation of the sovereignty of God and is, therefore, a form of idolatry.

• People holding these views are less likely to be the ones participating in elections. Many limit themselves to participating in intellectual debates in the media, and others hold themselves aloof from the political dynamics of their societies, hoping that their own isolated community will in some way be an inspiration to the broader Muslim community.

• Many prominent Islamic intellectuals and groups, however, argue that Islam and democracy are compatible. Some extend the argument to affirm that under the conditions of the contemporary world, democracy can be considered a requirement of Islam. In these discussions, Muslim scholars bring historically important concepts from within the Islamic tradition together with the basic concepts of democracy as understood in the modern world.The process in the Muslim world is similar to that which has taken place within other major religious traditions.

• All of the great world faith traditions represent major bodies of ideas, visions, and concepts fundamental to understanding human life and destiny.Many of these significant concepts have been used in different ways in different periods of history. The Christian tradition, for example, in premodern times provided a conceptual foundation for divine right monarchy; in contemporary times, it fosters the concept that Christianity and democracy are truly compatible.

• In all traditions, there are intellectual and ideological resources that can provide the justification for absolute monarchy or for democracy. The controversies arise regarding how basic concepts are to be understood and implemented.A relatively neutral starting point for Muslims is presented in a 1992 interview in the London Observer with the Tunisian Islamist leader and political exile, Rashid Ghanoushi: “If by democracy is meant the liberal model of government prevailing in the West, a system under which the people freely choose their representatives and leaders, in which there is an alternation of power, as well as all freedoms and human rights for the public, then Muslims will find nothing in their religion to oppose democracy, and it is not in their interests to do so.”

• Many Muslims, including Ghanoushi himself, go beyond this and view democracy as an appropriate way to fulfill certain obligations of the faith in the contemporary world.The Islamic tradition contains a number of key concepts that are presented by Muslims as the key to “Islamic democracy.” Most would agree that it is important for Muslims not simply to copy what non-Muslims have done in creating democratic systems, emphasizing that there are different forms that legitimate democracy can take. Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami, in a television interview in June before that country’s presidential elections, noted that “the existing democracies do not necessarily follow one formula or aspect. It is possible that a democracy may lead to a liberal system.

• It is possible that democracy may lead to a socialist system. Or it may be a democracy with the inclusion of religious norms in the government. We have accepted the third option.” Khatami presents a view common among the advocates of Islamic democracy that “today world democracies are suffering from a major vacuum, which is the vacuum of spirituality,” and that Islam can provide the framework for combining democracy with spirituality and religious government.The synthesis of spirituality and government builds on a fundamental affirmation at the heart of Islam: the proclamation that “There is no divinity but The God” and the affirmation of the “oneness” of God.

• This concept, called tawhid, provides the foundation for the idea that one cannot separate different aspects of life into separate compartments. Ali Shariati, who made important contributions to the ideological development of the Islamic revolution in Iran, wrote in On the Sociology of Islam, that tawhid “in the sense of oneness of God is of course accepted by all monotheists.

• But tauhid as a world view . . . means regarding the whole universe as a unity, instead of dividing it into this world and the here-after . . . spirit and body.” In this worldview, the separation of religion from politics creates a spiritual vacuum in the public arena and opens the way for political systems that have no sense of moral values. From such a perspective, a secular state opens the way for the abuse of power.

• The experiences of Muslim societies with military regimes that are secularist in ideological origin, such as the Baath Arab Socialist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, reinforce this mistrust of separating religious values from politics.Advocates of Islamic democracy argue that the Oneness of God requires some form of democratic system; conservatives contend that the idea of the sovereignty of the people contradicts the sovereignty of God; often the alternative then becomes some form of a monarchical system.

• The response to this is an affirmation of tawhid, as expressed by a Sudanese intellectual, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, in the October 2000 edition of Islam 21: “No Muslim questions the sovereignty of God or the rule of Shari’ah [the Islamic legal path].

• However, most Muslims do (and did) have misgivings about any claims by one person that he is sovereign. The sovereignty of one man contradicts the sovereignty of God, for all men are equal in front of God. . . . Blind obedience to one-man rule is contrary to Islam.” In this way, it is argued that the doctrine of tawhid virtually requires a democratic system because humans are all created equal and any system that denies that equality is not Islamic.

• There are a number of specific concepts that Muslims cite when they explain the relationship between Islam and democracy. In the Qur’an, the righteous are described as those people who, among other things, manage their affairs through “mutual consultation” or shura (42:38 Qur’an). This is expanded through traditions of the Prophet and the sayings and actions of the early leaders of the Muslim community to mean that it is obligatory for Muslims in managing their political affairs to engage in mutual consultation. Contemporary Muslim thinkers ranging from relatively conservative Islamists to more liberal modernists to Shi’ite activists emphasize the importance of consultation.

• There would be little disagreement with the view of Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shi’ite leader who was executed by Saddam Hussein in 1980, who said in Islamic Political System, that the people “have a general right to dispose of their affairs on the basis of the principle of consultation.” What this meant for the constitutional system of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was influenced by al-Sadr’s thought, was affirmed by President Khatami in last June’s interview: the “people play a fundamental role in bringing a government to power, in supervising the government and possibly the replacement of the government without any tension and problems.”

• Another basic concept in the development of Islamic democracy is “caliph.” In contemporary discussions, traditional political usage of the term caliph has been redefined. Historically the term caliph was used as the title of the monarchs who ruled the medieval Muslim empire. When medieval Muslim political philosophers spoke of the institutions of caliphal rule, the caliphate, they were were analyzing the political institution of the successors to the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community.

• However, this concept of the caliphate was something that developed after the death of the Prophet.In the Qur’an, the Arabic words for caliph (khalifah) and caliphate (khilafah) have a different meaning. These terms in the Qur’an have the more general meaning of steward and stewardship or trustee and trusteeship. In this way, Adam, as the first human, is identified as God’s caliph or steward on earth (2:30). Muhammad is instructed to remind humans that God made them the caliphs (stewards or trustees) of the earth (6:165). In this way, in the Qur’an, the term caliphate refers to the broad responsibilities of humans to be the stewards of God’s creation.

• By the late twentieth century, long after the last vestiges of the political caliphate had been abolished by the reforms of Ataturk in Turkey in 1924, Muslim intellectuals began to see the importance of the concept of all humans as “caliphs” or God’s stewards. As the intellectual dimensions of the late twentieth-century Islamic resurgence became more clearly defined, Ismail al-Faruqi, a scholar of Palestinian origins, outlined an ambitious project in a small book, Islamization of Knowledge.

• The concept of the caliphate involved responsibilities for all humans, in all dimensions of life, but especially the political: “Rightly, Muslims understand khilafah as directly political. . . . Islam requires that every Muslim be politicized (i.e., awakened, organized, and mobilized).” The implications of this reassertion of a more explicitly Qur’anic meaning of human stewardship for Islamic democracy were spelled out by the South Asian Islamist leader, Abu al-Ala Mawdudi in The Islamic Way of Life: “The authority of the caliphate is bestowed on the entire group of people, the community as a whole. . . . Such a society carries the responsibility of the caliphate as a whole and each one of its individual[s] shares the Divine Caliphate.

• This is the point where democracy begins in Islam. Every person in an Islamic society enjoys the rights and powers of the caliphate of God and in this respect all individuals are equal.” In theory and concept, Islamic democracy is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, quite well developed and persuasive. In actual practice the results have been less encouraging. Authoritarian rulers such as Ja’far Numayri in Sudan and Zia al-Haqq in Pakistan initiated formal programs of Islamization of the law and political system in the 1980s with results that were not encouraging for democracy.

• A military coup brought a combination of military and civilian Islamists to rule in Sudan in 1989 and despite the proclaimed goal of creating an Islamic democracy, the regime’s human rights record in terms of treatment of non-Muslim minorities and Muslim opposition groups is deplorable.International human rights groups have also been critical of the treatment of non-Muslim minorities in Iran, where the Shah was overthrown in 1979. During its first decade, the Islamic Republic set narrow limitations on political participation.

• However, the end of the nineties saw the unprecedented presidential election victory of Mohammad Khatami, who had not been favored by the conservative religious establishment. He was reelected by an overwhelming majority again in 2001. Although there are continuing grounds for criticizing Iran in terms of its repression of opposition and minorities, increasing numbers of women and youth are voting in elections. Instead of “one man, one vote, one time,” the “one man” is being joined by “one woman” as a voting force.

• Beyond the formally proclaimed Islamic political systems, there has also been an increasing role for democracy with an Islamic tone. In many countries, Muslims who are not activist Islamists have participated in electoral processes and brought a growing sense of the need for morality and Islamic awareness in the political arena.

• In an era when politics in many countries is becoming “desecularized,” leaders of Islamic organizations play important roles in electoral political systems that are not explicitly identified as Islamic. When the military regime of Suharto in Indonesia was brought to an end, the person who became president in 1999 as a result of the first open elections was Abd al-Rahman Wahid, the leader of Nahdat ul-Ulama, perhaps the largest Islamic organization in the world. He did not campaign on a platform of Islamizing the political system, even though he participated in the democratic system as a clearly identifiable Islamic leader. When he was removed as president this year, it was by a process of orderly replacement, and neither his followers nor his opponents engaged in religious warfare.

• Similarly, Islamically oriented political parties have operated successfully in the secular electoral politics of Turkey, with the leader of one such party, Necmettin Erbakan, serving as prime minister briefly in 1996-1997. Although in succession, the Islamically oriented Turkish parties have been suppressed and many of their leaders jailed, the response of the people in the parties has simply been to form new parties and try again within the political system rather than withdrawing into a violent underground opposition.

• The Turkish experience reflects the fact that many Muslims, whether living in formally secular or formally Islamic states, see democracy as their main hope and vehicle of effective political participation. One important dimension of this participation is that despite conservative Muslim opposition to the idea of rule by a woman, the three largest Muslim states in the world -- Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan -- have had or now have elected women as their heads of government. None of these women was explicitly Islamist and one was directly opposed by an Islamist party.In this complex context, it is clear that Islam is not inherently incompatible with democracy. “Political Islam” is sometimes a program for religious democracy and not primarily an agenda for holy war or terrorism.Islam and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1966) has been translated into a number of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, and Indonesian.

PERCEPTION

• Perception

• Perception is the process by which we receive and interpret information from the world around us. The world around us consists of various kinds and levels of physical energy. Our knowledge of the world comes through our sense organs, which react to these energies. Certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation stimulate our eyes.

• Our ears sense certain kinds of mechanical vibrations in the air. Our noses and tongues are sensitive to certain chemical stimuli. Sense organs in our skin respond to pressure, temperature changes, and various stimuli related to pain. Sense organs in our joints, tendons, and muscles are sensitive to body movement and position. The sense organs change the various environmental energies into nervous impulses, which go to the brain.

• Through the psychological process of perception, the patterns of energies become known as objects, events, people, and other aspects of the world. The process of perception does not reveal objects and events of the world. We see light and colour, but there is no light or colour in the electromagnetic waves that stimulate the eyes. In the same way, there is no music or noise in the vibrations that stimulate the ear.

• The brain organizes and interprets nervous impulses from the eyes as light and colour, and impulses from the ears as sound. Together, the sense organs and the brain transform physical energy from environmental stimuli into information about the events around us.

• When looking at the illustration on this page, you may first see only a complicated pattern of dark and light areas. As you study the pattern, your first perception may change, particularly if you are told that a bearded man is in the picture.

• After you have seen the man, it will be almost impossible not to see him when you look at the picture again. This picture emphasizes two important points about perception. First, stimulation of the sense organs alone does not determine the nature of what is perceived. Second, perception is a dynamic process of "working on" sensory data to produce perceptual objects and events.

• The "work" involves many physical, physiological, and psychological factors. Factors affecting perception Various factors influence what and how we perceive. Our perceptions are influenced by the ways our bodies are structured to receive and process stimuli from the environment. Our perceptions also reflect our emotions, needs, expectations, and learning. Receptors. Each sensory system, such as vision, hearing, or touch, has its own specialized body parts.

• These parts are called receptors, and they change energies from the environment into nervous impulses. The human eye, for example, has two major kinds of receptors in the retina (the light-sensitive part of the eye). These receptors are called rods and cones. The rods respond to the intensity of light, but not to different frequencies of light (different colours). The cones do respond to different frequencies of light, and are called colour receptors.

• The rods allow us to see in dim light, and the cones enable us to see colours and sharp detail in bright light. Thus, the particular ways that receptors are structured and function help determine the perceptual effects related to them. The brain. Certain physical and functional features of the brain also determine some aspects of perception.

• The part of the brain that serves vision has different kinds of cells that respond only under certain conditions of stimulation. Some of these cells respond only when a light goes off. Others respond when a light comes on, but they stop responding if the light stays on. Such cells also are arranged in special ways in the brain, and this fact is related to how we perceive. For example, some cells are arranged in columns or in clusters. Such arrangements are related to how we perceive edges and forms.

• Experiments suggest that some cells in the brain allow us to perceive movement. Thus, the structure of the brain is an important element in perception.

• Learning, Emotion, and Motivation.

• Much evidence points to the conclusion that early experience, learning, emotion, and motivation are important in defining what and how we perceive. Part of this accumulating evidence comes from experiments that compare how people in different cultures perceive things. The perception of such things as form, colour, pain, and touch may differ from culture to culture, depending on habits and customs, and training of children. A simple example of how learning can affect perception is provided by reading the phrases inside the two triangles in the illustration on the next page.

• Did you fail to see the duplicate word in each phrase? Most people do, and some continue to do so even with many repeated readings. In learning to perceive words and sentences, we learn not to perceive each letter and word separately. Instead, we become able to scan the overall pattern and "fill in" the remainder. A poor reader is more likely than a good reader to see the duplicate word in each phrase.

• Some illusions are related to learning and past experience. An illusion is not a false perception, as many people believe, but one that is inconsistent with another perception. Since perception does not literally reveal the environment, no sensory system is closer to some absolute truth than any other. We tend to check visual illusions against touch, but touch can involve illusory effects, too. Look at the two triangular patches of grey containing black and white detail in the illustration on this page.

• If you see the patches as being different shades of grey, you are experiencing an illusion. The patches are the same shade of grey. Emotions and motivation can have an important effect on perception. Sometimes a severe emotional disturbance can prevent perception completely, as when emotional shock causes individuals to lose their hearing temporarily. We are more likely to perceive those aspects of our environment that are related to our motives. For example, motivation can affect the perceived characteristics of objects. To hungry people, food may appear larger or more colourful than usual.

• Understanding Perception.

• Types of Perception.

• Perception has three levels of complexity: (1) detection, (2) recognition, and (3) discrimination. Detection refers to whether people can sense that they are being stimulated by some form of energy. For example, a light may be so dim they can barely detect its presence. Recognition means being able to identify as well as detect a particular pattern of stimulation. Discrimination means being able to perceive one pattern of stimulation as different from another. For example, a person may hear slight differences between two similar musical tones.

• The field of study that deals with levels of perception is called psychophysics. Experimental psychologists investigate the relationships between the physical properties of stimulus patterns and the perceived effects of the stimuli. For example, they may study the relationship between sound frequency and the perceived pitch of sound. Principles of perception.

• There are a number of general principles that help us understand the process of perception. One of the most important is the principle of closure. It tells us that we have the general tendency to perceive things as complete and unified. We tend to "fill in" parts that are missing, or parts that conform to an overall impression.

• The principle of constancy states that despite changes that occur in stimulation, we have a strong tendency to perceive objects as constant in size, shape, colour, and other qualities. For example, an orange will be perceived with its characteristic colour under different kinds of light.

• The opposite of the principle of constancy is also important. Sometimes an object or pattern of stimulation will remain constant, but the perceived effect will vary. Look at the grey and black cubes in the illustration on this page. At one moment you will see three complete cubes, and at another you may see five. Another important principle relates to perceptual context.

• The perception of an object or event depends in part on the context (surrounding conditions). Look at the two rectangles containing the words World Book in the illustration on this page. The words are printed with the same ink. Do they look the same? Background intensity and colour may affect the colour and intensity of elements upon it.

• To most people, grey surrounded by black appears brighter and somewhat larger. This effect is called visual induction. Notice, too, that the effect is opposite to that observed with the two grey triangles with black and white detail. In this case, the grey with black detail appears darker rather than brighter.