Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Hiding In Plain Sight

I have a vision problem. Unfortunately, it's not one that can be remedied with an optometric prescription, laser surgery or medication. The heart of the difficulty is that sometimes I don't see what is right in front of me.

It seems to happen in any number of purely domestic situations. For example, my wife Mary tells me that there is a certain food container in the refrigerator with something in it which I will like. I go stand in front of the refrigerator for long minutes, peering high and low, moving things around, but, alas, I don't see it. I call Mary. She walks up, opens the refrigerator, immediately puts her hand directly on the invisible item (without moving anything), picks it up, and hands it to me. The same thing happens with some regularity for clothes in my closet, almost any kitchen item smaller than a gallon milk jug, and most items in our office. It also happens with tools and materials in my workshop.

A couple of days ago, I had a somewhat more serious episode of this selective blindness that troubled me. Because of the cancer I am recovering from, I take a number of drugs and supplements. Naturally, these come in bottles of various sizes, which run out at different rates. We try to keep ahead of that by periodically checking the levels, and then calling in refills to the pharmacy. After we pick up those medicine containers at the pharmacy, we put them in a special place so that we will be ready to switch quickly when the current nearly-empty containers run out.

On the Friday before Christmas, I went through this level-checking drill and realized that one of the meds I take, which comes in liquid form, was going to run out before the weekend was over. I called in a refill as usual. Later in the afternoon, when I went to pick up this refill, the pharmacist told me that the insurance company had rejected the refill request because it was too soon by at least a week. In other words, according to them, I shouldn't have run out yet. I explained that, whatever the insurance company thought, I would be out of that particular medicine in one or two days.

The people at the University of Michigan Cancer & Geriatrics Center Pharmacy have become great friends, and they always go out of their way to help us. The person there who handles the phone and the insurance went right to work, and somehow bludgeoned the insurance company into accepting the claim. It took twenty minutes or so, but I was glad to wait for it. I thanked my pharmacy friends profusely, tooks the meds, and headed home.

Mary, who had not been involved in this particular refill request, put the new containers in the appropriate spot when I got home. A couple of days later, when I finally exhausted the current bottle, I went to get the next one. The refill bottle I had just picked up was there, but to my surprise I saw that there was also one more bottle. This was the one that the insurance company must have thought that I had. I swear that I looked in the refill spot before I called in the order. And it's not like it was one of a dozen identical little pill bottles, either. It was a relatively big container, roughly the size of a typical cough medicine bottle.

How could I have missed it? Why does this keep happening? How can I miss seeing items that are obviously right in front of me? Certainly it has to do with focus of attention, but what does that really mean here?

One could speculate that perhaps this selective vision has to do with how much one likes or desires the thing looked for. In other words, I would more readily see something I desire and less readily see something I did not desire. However, that doesn't really explain it. When I stand in front of the refrigerator, I am hungry and I desire food. In fact I desire the particular food I am looking for. Why cannot I see it? Similarly, I want to get dressed, so why can't I see the shirt I want hanging in front of me? I want to take the medicine because it is necessary for my health, so how could I possibly miss seeing it there on the shelf?

Upon reflection, I think this kind of vision error has to do with the degree of affinity or liking, not for the item looked for, but rather for the activity which the seeing is part of. I like food, for sure, but I dislike food preparation. It is almost as if, in my juvenile way, I'm still wanting someone to prepare all my meals for me. Mary in fact does the bulk of the food prep here and does a wonderful job of it without complaint. However, she does not and should not have to prepare absolutely everything I eat. I can manage at least a sandwich or bowl of soup without spousal assistance. The thing is, I don't like spending my time this way. I hate putting in more time preparing the food than it takes to eat it. My guess is that this dislike somehow negatively primes my visual recognition ability.

Mary, on the other hand, gets great satisfaction out of doing those very things I dislike so much. She has very little problem seeing things in the kitchen, the closet, or pretty much anywhere else in the house. Now that I think about it, our kids often suffered from the same kind of blindness while growing up, and likewise had to depend on her (e.g., "Mom, where are my shoes?" "You left them under the coffee table.")

However, Mary does have her vision problems, too. I realized this while helping her over the last number of weeks as she learns how to use Windows XP. She does not like computers, but she realizes that she has to be able to use them to some degree given the prevalence and usefulness of email, web browsing, etc. It turns out that Mary has this same kind of selective blindness when it comes to looking at the Windows desktop. I'll say something like "OK, see the little box to the right of the cursor?" or "Now click on the 'Move File' link in the left hand column", but those location descriptions are not useful for her. When Mary looks at the screen, she sees a confusing mass of text and icons. She does not see things that are right in front of her. Needless to say, this has been a continual source of difficulty for her in getting comfortable with Windows.

On the other hand, when I look at a computer screen, I take in the whole thing almost instantly, identifying all the points of interest without trying. I very rarely miss any important detail. In fact, at times I've been able to diagnose colleague's bugs or find typos in their prose with no more than a passing glance at a screen-full of text. You might say, "Ah, but perhaps it is just a matter of practice." Maybe, but I've always been that way with computers, all the way back to when I did my first programming in 1967 in a high school summer program. I took to computers like a bee to a field full of honeysuckle -- I needed no encouragement and no instruction. Obviously, I liked computers. I suspect that preference primed my visual recognition so that I always spotted salient details on a screen or printout very quickly.

So, perhaps one's ability to see things in a given context is modulated by how much one likes the activity that the seeing is part of. If so, what do you do when faced with an activity that you don't like to do, but that you have to do? The kind of seeing or blindness I've been talking about is an unconscious thing. Willpower will avail you little in fighting the unconscious. I'm not sure how I should approach my own issue in this regard. Now that I recognize this performance shortcoming in myself in certain domains, I can at least try to take it into account. For example, I suspect that slowing down will help. I am naturally inclined to hurry through activities I dislike, which aggravates the blindness problem. If I slow down so that I truly look, I'll bet I'll see more than I have been seeing. Also, "no man is an island" (Paul Simon notwithstanding), so I should also just accept the fact that my blind spots and Mary's blind spots are at least complementary.

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