Joanne McNeill: Learn to look rather than see

Joanne McNeill

A man who accidentally shot his son while on a hunting trip was discharged without conviction recently in an Invercargill court.

His defence lawyer claimed that cognitive bias meant the man genuinely believed he was shooting a deer.

Cognitive bias is a deviation from rational judgment in which inferences may be drawn illogically, allowing individuals to create subjective reality, leading to perceptual distortions, inaccuracies and illogical interpretations. Apparently it's common in hunting circles.

I know nothing of hunting but I do know that cognitive bias is by no means confined to hunters.

In my book, it's the widespread tendency of humans to see what they want, expect or are told to see, despite evidence to the contrary. In other words, we're making it up as we go along.

Visual artists confront this pitfall when they try to draw from life. To do it successfully, they must learn to override cognitive bias, to look at the visual information in front of them rather than seeing their own preconceptions. Seeing and looking are vastly different. Looking reveals what's there, whereas seeing creates realities subjectively from a range of quite possibly inaccurate, hard-wired cognitive sources.

Luckily, there's a trick to drawing from life. Anyone can. All it takes is to look always at the subject while drawing, never at the paper. It requires practice though because cognition, that faithful auto-pilot we rely on to know what's what at all times, is not easily relegated to the back seat, and it feels scary at first, like flying blind; but with persistence it becomes evident how much truer is the drawing. Likewise, playing a musical instrument well requires learning to do it without looking at one's fingers (although when practising chords while deliberately looking the other way, a candle set fire to my guitar, so do not try this at home).

Drawing also suffers cognitive bias after the fact. Artists might perceive something wonky with the picture but, because cognitive bias helpfully corrects mistakes, they cannot diagnose the cause. Luckily, another studio trick works here too. Holding the picture up to a mirror immediately reveals glaring inconsistencies because reversing images defeats familiarity.

Writers editing their own work have the same problem. While mistakes in other people's texts jump out like sore toes, writers can reread their own blunders without seeing them because their decoding brains, accustomed to making nonsense logical, gloss over pesky typos in their eagerness to confirm the intended sense.

There's a handy trick to overcome this nuisance too, which is to read your own work out loud. Something about this process immediately makes text inaccuracies obvious. I'm not sure why - maybe projected sound lends an illusion of objectivity or maybe speech requires cognitive faculties to pay more attention.

Unfortunately, I know no handy tricks for overcoming the unwitting cognitive bias which undoubtedly affects everyone's behaviour - on roads, in the bush, with guns - where honest mistakes can be fatal, rather than merely annoying or embarrassing.

No amount of mirrors or declaiming would help hunters - and training courses could easily reinforce biases - but learning to look rather than see is useful general education for anyone. My prescription is compulsory life-drawing classes for all.