Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part I: Assess

Leonardo da Vinci and Losing Your Mind

(The Importance of Seeing What Matters)

Elementary Skills

(Mastering the Fine Art of Observation)

The Platypus and the Gentleman Thief

(Why No Two People See Things the Same Way)

Delta Employees Do It on the Fly

(The Who, What, When, and Where of Objective Surveillance)

What’s Hiding in Plain Sight?

(Seeing the Forest and the Trees)

Part II: Analyze

Keep Your Head on a Swivel

(Analyzing from Every Angle)

Seeing What’s Missing

(How to Prioritize Like an Undercover Agent)

Part III: Articulate

Making Your Unknown Known

(How to Avoid Communication Breakdowns)

Big (Naked, Obese) Sue and the High School Principal

(How to See and Share Hard Truths)

Part IV: Adapt

Nothing Is Black-and-White

(Overcoming Our Inherent Biases)

What to Do When You Run Out of Gurneys

(How to Navigate Uncertainty)

Conclusion: Master Work

Acknowledgments

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Amy E. Herman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herman, Amy, author.

Title: Visual intelligence: sharpen your perception, change your life / Amy E. Herman.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2016]

An Eamon Dolan Book. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037245 | ISBN 9780544381056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544381063 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544947122 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780544882003 (pbk. (international edition))

Subjects: LCSH: Visual perception. | Visual literacy.

Classification: LCC BF241 .H436 2016 | DDC 152.14—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037245

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Cover image © Deborah Sussman

Author photograph © Christine Butler

v9.0919

To Ian. Everything. Always.

The world is full of magic things,

patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Author’s Note

It has been my great privilege to teach The Art of Perception for fourteen years. In doing so, I have spoken with and written to thousands of people from around the world about their experiences with art, observation, perception, and communication. Since some of these conversations took place years before this book was even an idea, since my wonderful program participants didn’t plan on being part of this book when they signed up for my class, and since many of my interviewees have extremely sensitive jobs, I have changed the names and identifying details of most of the people whose stories appear in this book to protect their privacy. Any resulting resemblances to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental and unintentional. Visual Intelligence is a work of nonfiction. All stories are recounted as they happened or were told to me, subject to the limitations of memory. I couldn’t fact-check all of the personal stories people told me, but I included only those I believed to be true.

Note from the Publisher: The text of this ebook is accompanied by full-color art reproductions and photographs. For the best reading experience, this ebook should be viewed on a color device.

Introduction

AS I STOOD in the hallway outside the apartment, everything took on a hazy, slow-motion quality. Shouting echoed behind the door. Dust particles floated in the fluorescent light. A cat mewed from somewhere to my left. The officer in front of me raised his fist to knock, while his partner—tense, armed, ready for action—covered him. As the domestic dispute blared beyond the door, the black hole of the second officer’s gun barrel gaped like a silent scream. How had I gotten here?

Since I was little, I had seen the art in everything: in the beautiful asymmetry of sunlight streaming through the trees and the unique patterns of stones and shells left behind when the tide washed out. I was never a particularly creative person myself, but that didn’t stop me from studying art history. Following college, though, my upbringing by my scientist father and ultra-practical mother and a desire to serve led me to law school. And this particularly intense police ride-along.

To detach myself from the worry bubbling in my gut, I studied my surroundings as I would a painting, analyzing each nuance, taking stock of both foreground and back, trying to find meaning in small, seemingly incongruent details. I knew this was an unusual way to think—I’d been told so often enough—but I always found my art background useful in the practice of law, where the need to be an objective observer is critical.

And then I had a terrible thought: what if the officers I was with didn’t have these skills? What the first officer saw when the door opened—be it a crying baby, a confused elderly woman, or a gun-wielding madman—and how he conveyed it to his partner in that split second would affect the outcome for every one of us. My life was in the hands of a virtual stranger and his ability to see and accurately convey what he saw.

Thankfully the police were able to defuse the situation and my experience didn’t end in disaster, but as generally happens when we’re nose-to-nose with a deadly weapon for the first time or forced to face our own mortality, it haunted me for years after. How many times do our lives depend upon someone else’s observation skills? For most of us, it’s too many to count: whenever we get on an airplane or a train, into a taxicab, or onto an operating table. It’s not always life-or-death; sometimes it’s just life-altering. Other people’s attention to detail and follow-through can also affect our job, our reputation, our safety, and our success. And we can affect theirs. It’s a responsibility we shouldn’t take lightly, as it can mean the difference between a promotion and a demotion, between a triumph and a tragedy, between a normal Tuesday in September and 9/11.

Seeing clearly and communicating effectively are not rocket science; they’re straightforward skills. We’re born hardwired for both. But more often than we’d care to admit, we fail to use these skills. We show up at the wrong airport gate and try to board the wrong plane, we send an email to the wrong recipient saying something we never should have said, we miss a key piece of evidence that was staring us right in the face. Why? Because we’re hardwired for those errors as well.

Our brains can see only so much, and can process even less. I knew this from years of practicing law and witnessing firsthand the unreliability of eyewitnesses and the fallibility of first-person accounts, but it wasn’t until I followed my heart back to the art world that I began to actively investigate the mysteries of perception. As the head of education of The Frick Collection in New York City, I helped bring a course created by a dermatology professor at Yale to NYC medical schools, teaching students to analyze works of art in order to improve their patient observation skills. It was very successful—a clinical study found that the students who took the course had diagnostic skills that were 56 percent better than peers who didn’t—and I wanted to understand the science behind it. I wanted to know more about the mechanics of how we see and how simply looking at art could improve.

I became a neuroscience fanatic, reading all the research I could find and interviewing the researchers who’d conducted it. I even signed up for an online community neuroscience video game. And I discovered that while my own perceptions about how we see were wrong on many levels—apparently the retina is part of the brain, not the eye—they were spot-on in the most important ways: while we might not fully understand the human brain, we can change it. We can train our brains to see more, and to observe more accurately.

And as I often do when I learn something fantastic, I wanted to share it with everyone, not just medical students. I was out to dinner with friends sharing some of what I learned one night soon after 9/11, when the city was still reeling from the terrorist attacks and resulting stories of heroism and heartbreak. One of my friends asked if I had considered training first responders. I hadn’t, but as I thought back to my fear in the hallway on that law student ride-along, not knowing how the officers I was with would see or react to what they saw, it made perfect sense. I fell in love with the idea of pairing cops with Rembrandt; I just had to convince the law enforcement community. The following Monday I cold-called the NYPD.

I’d like to bring your cops to our museum to look at art, I told the bewildered deputy commissioner. I half expected him to hang up on me, but to his credit, he agreed to give it a try. Within a few weeks, we had weapons in the Frick for the first time ever, and The Art of Perception® was born.

I’ve been teaching the class for fourteen years now, training officers from thirteen divisions of the NYPD, as well as the police departments in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Virginia State Police, and the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police. Word of the program’s effectiveness spread quickly, and my client list grew to include the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, Scotland Yard, the US Army, Navy, National Guard, Secret Service, and Marshal Service, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the National Park Service.

The Wall Street Journal soon profiled my class and its positive effects on the law enforcement, legal, and military sectors in a story about an undercover FBI agent who credited my training with helping him sharpen his observation skills. After taking The Art of Perception, the agent was able to collect incriminating evidence against a Mob-controlled garbage collection syndicate that resulted in thirty-four convictions and the government seizure of $60 to $100 million in assets. Almost immediately, I started getting calls from private companies, educational institutions, and even workers’ unions. Because in reality, all of us—parents, teachers, flight attendants, investment bankers, even doormen—are first responders on some level.

The Art of Perception’s unique pedagogy has been called invaluable by the Department of Defense and credited with stimulating the innovative thinking necessary to generate viable future war-fighting concepts by the chief of naval operations. After attending my seminar at an FBI National Academy program, Inspector Benjamin Naish arranged for me to present to the Philadelphia Police Department, stating, I felt like I had my eyes opened wider [in this course, and I knew it was] the most unusual training they’re ever going to have a chance to see.

What’s so unusual about it? I show pictures of naked women with breasts sagging on their stomachs and sculptures made from urinals to teach the fine art of accurate observation and effective communication.

And it works.

I’ve helped thousands of people from dozens of walks of life—law firms, libraries, auction houses, hospitals, universities, Fortune 500 companies, entertainment companies, banks, unions, and even churches—strengthen and sharpen their visual analysis and critical-thinking skills. And I can teach you.

Because medical and law enforcement professionals aren’t the only ones who need to know how to identify pertinent information, prioritize it, draw conclusions from it, and communicate it. We all do. A single missed detail or miscommunicated word can just as easily botch a cappuccino order, a million-dollar contract, or a murder investigation. I know because every week I stand in front of the best and the brightest and watch as they miss critical information . . . over and over again. No one is immune to this failure to see, not presidents or postal workers, not babysitters or brain surgeons.

And then I watch them get better. Whether I’m teaching customer service or information technology agents, artists or archivists, students or surveillance experts, people who are already very good at their jobs invariably get even better. I watch the transformation every single session, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to help you transform as well.

JR, Women Are Heroes, Kenya: Self-Portrait in a Woman’s Eye, Kenya, 2009.

This photograph is a self-portrait of the artist JR—or at least one perspective of him in someone else’s eye. JR had a problem in that he was becoming increasingly famous for his photographic portraits that were blown up to billboard size and attached to the tops and sides of buildings all over the world—to put a human face to the most impoverished areas of the world—but since he never got permits for them, warrants for his arrest had been issued in several countries. He was asked to create a self-portrait but was hesitant to show his facial attributes out of fear it might facilitate his arrest. His solution: Self-Portrait in a Woman’s Eye. I love this photograph because it encapsulates exactly what The Art of Perception is all about: shifting our perspective and our expectations further than we ever thought possible.

Think of this book as your new self-portrait. You can use it to step back and see yourself through new eyes. What do you look like to the world? How well do you communicate? How well do you observe? What’s behind you and around you and inside you?

From this book, you’ll learn how to sharpen your own inherent intelligence gathering, strategic and critical thinking, decision making, and formulation of inquiry skills using the amazing computer between your ears. Unlike other books by psychologists or reporters, though, this one will not just tell you what your brain can do or how people are using theirs to the limit, it will show you.

We’ll use the same interactive training I use to engage leaders around the globe. We’ll practice reconciling larger concepts with more specific details, articulating visual and sensory information, and conveying it in an objective and precise manner with the help of water lilies, women in corsets, and a nude or two.

Take a look at the photograph on the next page. It hasn’t been retouched or digitally altered; what you see actually existed this way. What do you think is going on in the photograph, and where was it taken?

Anna Schuleit Haber, Bloom: A Site-specific Installation, 2003.

The most common answer I get is flowers in an old abandoned building for some kind of art installation. And that’s partially correct. It is an old building, those are real flowers, and they were put there intentionally by an artist. What kind of building do you think it is? We see a hallway with many doors, and a window at the end of that hallway. People guess it’s an office building or some kind of school, but it’s not. It’s something most people never consider: a psychiatric hospital.

When the Massachusetts Mental Health Center was slated for demolition after ninety years in service to make way for more modern facilities, artist Anna Schuleit Haber commemorated its closing by filling it with what it had always lacked. (Sadly, she was inspired by her observation that patients in psychiatric hospitals rarely receive flowers, as there are no wishes for a speedy recovery.) Her resulting installation, Bloom, turns our thinking about mental health care upside down. We do not associate vibrant color with a deteriorating building or expect to see life oozing from the halls of a psychiatric facility. In the same way, this book will alter the way you observe the world. You will see color and light and detail and opportunity where you swore there were none. You will see life and possibility and truth in the emptiest spaces. You will see order and find answers in the most chaotic and messiest places. You will never see the same way again.

All of my requests for The Art of Perception live presentation come from enthusiastic referrals because once people’s eyes are opened, they can’t shut their mouths about it. They want everyone to experience the same revelation and reward. Past participants flood my email in-box with stories of how the training gave them more confidence in their jobs, helped them win promotions, improved their customer service, saved their companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, doubled and tripled their fund-raising outcomes, raised their standardized test scores, and even kept their children out of unnecessary special education classes.

Learning to see what matters can change your world as well. I invite you to open your eyes and see how. I bet you’ll discover you didn’t even know they were closed.

PART I

…

Assess

We find only the world we look for.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

1

Leonardo da Vinci and Losing Your Mind

The Importance of Seeing What Matters

WHEN DERRECK KAYONGO stepped into the shower in his Philadelphia hotel room, he noticed something that millions of business travelers and families on holiday before him had seen and not paid any particular attention to: the tiny bar of soap on the corner shelf. It was different. Instead of the smooth green oval he had used the evening before, a small cardboard box sat in its place. Inside was a brand-new bar of soap.

The Ugandan native, who as a child had left everything behind when he and his family fled Idi Amin’s murderous dictatorship, was a recent American college graduate, and on a tight budget. He turned off the water, dressed, and took the unused soap down to the concierge desk.

I want to make sure I am not charged for this, he told the employee. I have not used it, and do not need it.

Oh, don’t worry, it’s complimentary, the concierge answered.

Thank you, but I already got one yesterday when I arrived, Kayongo explained. Where is that one?

We replace the soap every day for every guest, the concierge assured him. No charge.

Kayongo was shocked. Every room, every day? In every hotel? Throughout America?

What do you do with the old bars? he asked. Unlike the slivers of soap used in the African refugee camps he had grown up in, the bar from his shower was fairly substantial; it seemed almost brand-new even after he had used it.

Housekeeping throws them away, the concierge said, and shrugged.

Where?

Just the regular trash.

I’m not a great mathematician, Kayongo tells me, but I quickly realized that if only half of the hotels did this, it was an incredible amount of soap—hundreds of millions of bars just being dumped into landfills. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Kayongo called his father, a former soap maker, back in Africa and told him the news. You won’t believe it. In America, they throw away soap after they have used it only once!

People there can afford to waste soap, his father told him.

But in Kayongo’s mind it was a waste no one could afford, not when he knew more than two million people, most of them toddlers, still died every year from diarrheal disease, a malady easily prevented by the simple act of washing one’s hands with soap. Soap was a luxury item many in Africa could not afford, yet in America it was simply thrown away. Kayongo decided to try to do something with his new country’s trash to help his old country.

Back home in Atlanta, he drove around to local hotels and asked if he could have their used soap.

At first they thought I was crazy, he remembers, a smile spilling through his voice over the phone. Why do you want those? They are dirty. Yes, that was a problem, but we can clean them. We can clean soap!

Kayongo found a recycling facility to scrape, melt, and disinfect the bars of soap he collected, and the charity Global Soap Project was born. He has since recycled one hundred tons of soap and distributed repurposed, life-saving bars along with a hygiene education program to people in thirty-two countries on four continents. In 2011, Kayongo was deservedly named one of CNN’s Heroes.

Unlike the heroes of old movies and swashbuckling fables, we don’t have to be the strongest, fastest, smartest, richest, handsomest, or luckiest to get ahead or make a difference in the world. The most successful people in modern times—people such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, and Derreck Kayongo—prove that it doesn’t matter what physical attributes we have or don’t, our level of education, our profession, our station in life, or where we live.

We can survive and thrive today if we know how to see.

To see what’s there that others don’t. To see what’s not there that should be. To see the opportunity, the solution, the warning signs, the quickest way, the way out, the win. To see what matters.

Even if we don’t long for front-page accolades, acute and accurate observation yields rewards big and small across all aspects of life. When a housekeeper at a Minneapolis hotel noticed a young girl alone in a room who wouldn’t make eye contact, wasn’t dressed for the cold weather, and had no luggage, she reported it, and helped uncover an international sex trafficking ring. When an astute waiter at a crowded Israeli coffeehouse noticed that the schoolboy who asked for a glass of water was sweating profusely while wearing a heavy overcoat on a mild day, he looked more intently and saw a small wire sticking out of the boy’s large black duffel bag. His observation kept the boy from detonating a large explosive that the local police chief said would have caused a major disaster.

The ability to see, to pay attention to what is often readily available right in front of us, is not only a means to avert disaster but also the precursor and prerequisite to great discovery.

While millions of people have enjoyed using a new bar of hotel soap each day, only Kayongo saw the potential for a life-saving recycling program. What made him see exactly the same thing that others had, but see it in a different way? The same thing that allowed Swiss hiker George de Mestral to look down at his burr-covered socks and see a new type of adhesion; Mestral’s discovery of what he christened Velcro revolutionized the way astronauts and skiers suited up, saved an entire generation of kids from learning how to tie their shoes, and still posts $260 million a year in sales. The same thing that made Houston mom Betsy Ravreby Kaufman see plastic Easter eggs as a way to cook hard-boiled eggs without their shells. Tired of wasting food and time when the process of peeling eggs left behind a mess, Kaufman envisioned boiling eggs in an egg-shaped container from the start, thereby eliminating the need for shells altogether. Her invention, Eggies, plastic egg-size cups with lids, sold more than five million units in 2012 alone. The same thing that helped propel Apple icon Steve Jobs to the top of the technological heap: an ability to see. Jobs reported, When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Leonardo da Vinci attributed all of his scientific and artistic accomplishments to the same concept, which he called saper vedere (sah-PEAR veh-DARE-ay)—knowing how to see. We might also call his gift visual intelligence.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? You just have to see. We’re born with the inherent ability; in fact, our body does it involuntarily. If your eyes are open, you are seeing. But there’s more to the neurobiological process than just keeping your eyelids propped up.

A BRIEF BIOLOGY OF SIGHT

I’m not a scientist, but I was raised by one—my father is a parasitologist—so I knew that the best way to investigate why we see the way we do was not to just read the cutting-edge studies on human vision and perception but to go out and meet the people who conducted them. My first stop: Dr. Sebastian Seung.

Thanks to his captivating TED talk and EyeWire, the visionary retina-mapping project he heads, Dr. Seung is something of a rock star in neuroscience. As I pull open the front doors of his lab at the new Princeton Neuroscience Institute, a labyrinthine complex of glass and aluminum, I can feel my blood pressure rise. The building is intimidating from the first step. There is no receptionist or directory listing, just an unmarked, open elevator. I step inside and quickly determine that I might not be smart enough for the building. I can’t get the elevator to move; push and hold as I might, the buttons won’t stay lit. There is no signage, no slot for a key card.

Help arrives in the form of an affable young student wearing a LINEAR ALGEBRA IS MY HOMEBOY T-shirt. He presses his ID against a small glass panel, and we rise. I tell him whom I’m here to see.

Good luck, he says with a smile. I hope I won’t need it.

Returning to Princeton is something of a full-circle moment for me, as I moved to the town for my first job out of law school and lived just off Nassau Street for five years. To keep my sanity, on the weekends I volunteered as a docent at the Princeton University Art Museum.

When I meet Dr. Seung and see that he’s wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I instantly relax. Seung exudes an easy charm and has a gift for making the extraordinarily complex seem not so. As he explains, seeing doesn’t have as much to do with our eyes as I once thought.

While our sense of sight is most often associated with the spherical organs that occupy the orbits of the skull, the brain is really the workhorse of the visual processing system. Not only does processing what we see engage a full 25 percent of our brain and over 65 percent of all our brain pathways—more than any of our other senses—it begins in a part of the eye that is really the brain.

The process starts when light passes through the pupil of our eye and is converted into electrical patterns by neural cells on a membrane at the back called the retina. When I tell Seung I remember learning in high school that the retina is like the film in a camera, he shakes his head at this common misconception.

It’s definitely not film, he says. The retina’s such a complicated structure that it’s not even a camera. It’s more like a computer.

The retina isn’t a passive pathway but a part of the brain itself formed in utero from neural tissue.

Studying the retina is our easiest way into the brain, Seung explains, because it is the brain.

3D printout of a neuron.

To thank him for introducing me to the beauty and complexity of the retina, and for referring me to scores of other scientists, I have brought him a gift: one of the first-ever 3D-printed neurons.

I had downloaded the printable file, a J cell named IFLS mapped for EyeWire by citizen scientists, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange, and then visited my local MakerBot store, which had the technology to print out a vastly enlarged replica of the neuron. The delicate sculpture resembled a lumpy seed, reminiscent of a tiny brain itself, sprouting a serpentine system of slender branches, the dendrites that conduct the electrical messages between cells.

I have seen the network of retinal neurons laced together—referred to as the jungle by Seung—in the EyeWire computer program he runs, each neuron a different neon color to make its paths more apparent, but as I hold it in my hand, the importance of each connection is magnified. With 100 million retinal receptors, the retina not only does the bulk of image preprocessing, it must also spatially encode or compress an image before it is sent along the 1.2 million axons in the optic nerve traveling to the brain.

Some of the first steps of perception are actually happening inside the retina itself, even before the information reaches the brain, Seung asserts.

This explains why it is easier to transplant or artificially create other organs than working prosthetic eyes, since they are so intricately interwoven with our brains.

What this all boils down to is that we don’t see with our eyes; we see with our brain.

USE IT OR LOSE IT

Our ability to see, make sense of what we see, and act upon that information relies on the brain’s incredible processing power, a power that is entirely dependent upon our neural connections. Assuming all of our physical wiring is healthy and intact, turning visual inputs into meaningful images takes time, time that increases with age or lack of use.

Scientists have discovered that as we slow down or stop flexing our mental muscles, the speed of neural transmission dramatically slows, which in turn leads to a decrease in visual processing speed, the ability to detect change and movement, and the ability to conduct a visual search. Since our brain controls every function of our body, any lag in neural processing will likewise cause a delay in other systems, including what we see and how we react to it. Slower reflexes and remembrance times aren’t caused only by physical aging. It might be that we just haven’t exercised our brains enough or in the right way.

Fortunately for all of us, throughout our lives, our brain is continually making new connections and reinforcing old ones based on learning experiences . . . as long as we are learning. Researchers have found that stimulating environmental input—like studying something new, reading about a concept that makes you think, or playing any kind of brain games—will increase cortical growth at every age, even among the very oldest humans. Just as cognitive conditioning can be used to stave off dementia, it can also be used to sharpen our ability to observe, perceive, and communicate. If we can keep our senses and our wits quick, our reactions will follow, making us better employees, better drivers, and more capable of