Men who were Boy Scouts in the 1960s almost certainly recall an ad run perennially in the back of Boy’s Life magazine (the national Scouting publication). Today, it would be considered intolerably incongruous with the wholesome image Scouting seeks to project, but back then it was apparently accepted as an unremarkable reflection of pubescent male curiosity. The product advertised was “X-ray Glasses,” accompanied by a cartoon graphic suggesting they allowed the wearer to see through women’s clothing, revealing either a skeleton or Sears catalog-esque undergarments. Of course, the implication was that one might somehow employ these amazing lenses to glimpse the female form. I don’t know what those glasses actually did, since I never mailed in the few bucks required to buy a pair, but I do know it wasn’t that. Even as a young lad, I was pretty sure the implied superpower wasn’t really possible, titillating as its prospects were. After all, Superman had real X-ray vision and–as far as we knew–he never got to enjoy unobstructed views of the women around him. I resigned myself to continued ignorance; female bodies would remain invisible to me for years to come.
Fast forward several decades. I’m standing with a new riding buddy at the base of a very steep, very long, extremely rocky and deeply rutted hill-climb on my first visit to an OHV park. As a transplant to East Tennessee who’d previously only ridden off-road on the flat, sandy terrain of Central Florida, this sight was utterly alien to me. The idea someone could ride a motorcycle up such a topographical nightmare was incomprehensible. In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to me that’s exactly what my friend had brought me there to do! I thought we were simply sightseeing on my introduction to local trails after getting back into dirt bikes, which I’d abandoned for street riding before taking up residence among the Appalachian mountains. My companion, who’d cut his off-roading teeth on this kind of hellscape, was as baffled by my incredulity as I was by his nonchalance. Not wanting to appear wimpy, I hurled myself up that slope without the slightest inkling of what I was supposed to do, and suffered the expectable repeated crashes, providing anyone watching with a spectacular display of airborne acrobatics. Meanwhile, my buddy cruised right up the mountainside with nary a dab. I couldn’t believe we were engaged in the same activity.
As I developed some proficiency in this type of riding, I came to realize my friend had been looking at a completely different scene than the one I’d observed. He had a type of X-ray vision I didn’t even realize existed, allowing him to instantaneously perceive a continuous, passable route where I saw only a frighteningly chaotic jumble of rocks, roots and ruts. The one interpretation I could superimpose on the image before me was the inevitability of countless painful physical injuries. It’s the difference between looking at a page in a book when you know how to read and when you don’t. For those in the know, it’s impossible to not see words and meanings; they’re effortlessly apparent, built into perception itself. For the illiterate, however, all that’s visible is a morass of squiggles and spaces, no matter how they might squint and strain to make something more of it. It’s as impenetrable as women’s clothing to a ‘60s-era Scout.
We can’t see what we don’t know. For example, someone unversed in the various categories of motorcycles doesn’t see cruisers, sportbikes, ADVs, naked standards, motocrossers and touring rigs in a dealership showroom. They just see two-wheeled contraptions with lots of different shapes attached. They may immediately understand a machine with big panniers can carry more than one without luggage, but they may also assume those same bags could be popped onto any motorcycle, with no way of appreciating how the rest of a bike might contribute to, or subtract from, its cargo carrying capabilities or appropriateness for long-distance travel. Aside from such readily recognized purposeful elements, they’d be at a loss to identify the vast majority of visible parts or speculate as to their respective functions. Those parts would merely appear as painted or chromed protrusions, hunks of plastic and metal, perhaps with aesthetically pleasing or displeasing colors and contours.
Writing in the late 1800s, American philosopher and psychologist, William James, described the infant’s initial sensory experience as a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” The assumed lack of cognitive structure in such a creature’s mind would be all but unimaginable at later stages of development. Something as fundamental as “unitization”–the identification of individual items in our perceptual field–would be profoundly absent. So, rather than seeing a 3-D space populated by chairs, tables, lamps, etc., the infant’s view of their room would be an undifferentiated hodgepodge of lights, shadows and colors, none of which would have a name or meaning, or even a defined boundary or discernable degree of proximity. Countless attributes we take for granted would be completely unintelligible to a mind that had yet to be informed by experience and instruction. We’ve since come to understand infants have more innate appreciation of certain aspects of their surroundings than James speculated, but these seem limited to a few bits with survival value, like recognizing their mother’s scent.
This principle of human perception–that we each evolve from a state of undifferentiated awareness to one of increasingly sophisticated differentiation–is true and relevant throughout the lifespan. Learning allows us to not only contemplate things differently, but to also see (or hear or feel or smell or taste) them more distinctly and evocatively right from the start. Sensory perceptions are imbued with meaning before we get to any conscious reflections or deliberate mental manipulations. This has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, if I’m scanning my motorcycle for possible problems and I know there should be no dangling bare wires, the sight of such an aberration would immediately stand out to me as concerning. However, if I have no basis for distinguishing a loose, bare wire from any other wire on the chassis, I may detect nothing of note in the exact same visual image; they’d all just be totally generic “wires” to me. I’d have had to learn all wires should be secured and insulated, and that short circuits and other failures can result from deviations from this rule. More fundamentally, I’d have to be able to distinguish between wires and other narrow cylindrical objects, like small-gauge hoses, which might appropriately dangle bare-ended, as in the case of the one that transports fuel spillage away from the tank’s orifice and deposits it neatly on the ground.
The concept of someone not knowing the difference between a wire and a hose is probably inconceivable to most everyone in this column’s audience, but such people definitely do exist. If you can do the following without collapsing into derisive laughter, try asking a non-rider, non-mechanic friend or family member what they think this or that motorcycle component does. You could also use a car or your tool collection for the same experiment. If they say they don’t know, request their guess. You may be shocked at how little awareness they have of things glaringly apparent to you. Aside from their ignorance (by which I simply mean a lack of knowledge, not lack of intelligence), note how they create meaning in the absence of sufficient information. Whether or not they’re deliberately guessing in response to your prompt, their imaginations are at work–for better or for worse.
The human mind, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum and “fills in the blanks” using interpolation and extrapolation from other areas. You might find this hard to believe, but I’ve encountered more than one adult who thought internal combustion engines propel vehicles via the forceful expulsion of gasses through their exhaust pipes. These people weren’t idiots, but the workings of a mechanical drivetrain were completely unknown to them. They’d seen jets and rockets move as a result of stuff shooting out of their tails. Why wouldn’t they imagine landbound craft work the same way? This is actually a somewhat common deduction among children. If they never have exposure to a different explanation, or reason to question their initial assumption, they may continue with this inaccurate mental model indefinitely. Yes, they’d have to overlook a car’s ability to travel backwards, but people routinely ignore all sorts of things that don’t fit their preconceived notions. So, refrain from cackling when people exhibit this normal human foible; no doubt you’re doing something similar in another domain. While the theories we come up with can be hilariously preposterous, they’re also part of a larger dynamic that often serves us well and is an absolutely necessary and commonplace feature of human nature.
The Ride Inside with Mark Barnes is brought to you by the MOA Foundation. You can join the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America quickly and easily to better take advantage of the Paul B. Grant and Clark Luster training reimbursement programs offered by the Foundation.
We can’t possibly know all the relevant information as we move through the myriad complexities facing us on any given day. Our brains fill in the gaps with our best guesses, based on what reference points we possess. Most often, our inferences are correct, or at least correct enough to facilitate our successful navigation of ordinary challenges. When the gaps are vast, we must reach further afield, which increases the likelihood of erroneous assumptions. Nevertheless, we often have to make decisions on the fly and can’t go researching everything we don’t know–especially when we don’t even realize we don’t know it. Remember, this process is automatic and instantaneous and usually doesn’t register in consciousness; it’s unnoticed and unquestioned. I see there’s a pipe sticking out the back of my car. I know engine exhaust shoots out of it. Of course my car is thereby pushed forward through space, end of story. It is what it is and no further consideration is indicated.
Not knowing can be bad. Not knowing we don’t know is usually worse. But thinking we know when we don’t is certainly always The Worst. When the blank is already filled in, it’s more difficult to insert something truer and the misconception may endure.
Here’s an example of how our perception’s dependence upon experience can be seriously problematic. If I’m contending with traffic congestion and don’t know common cues as to other drivers’ likely behavior, I won’t notice tell-tale signs that could easily alert me to danger and prompt evasive maneuvers. These could include things like a driver’s head position, where their front wheels are pointed at a stop, or a pattern of impulsively erratic movements. If I haven’t learned these details have relevant meanings, they won’t appear on my radar. Even the simple configuration of an oncoming car in the left-turn lane at an intersection ought to include the implicit perception of potential danger, no thinking required, but I’m not born with such awareness–it’s something I must learn to see, just like a rideable line up a gnarly hill-climb.
“Intentional blindness” (see Binoculars, Blindness and Invisibility, posted on 10/30/22) is a phenomenon wherein people only see what they’re prepared to see. While novelty sometimes calls attention to itself, it can also be overlooked when the observer has no basis for expecting it or is intentionally attending to some other aspect. If you’ve never witnessed something fly off the back of a flatbed truck and present a lethal threat to other vehicles, you might not “see” unsecured objects on the flatbed truck ahead of you, even though they’re plainly visible in an objective sense. Subjectively, they don’t register any more than viable paths up that hill-climb registered to me as a naïve Appalachian trail rider. You’d have no cause for vigilance or self-protective action because you lack the X-ray vision to see what’s right in front of you with the necessary discernment. This deficit is compounded whenever we’re deliberately paying close attention to another variable, like an upcoming exit sign. It’s vitally important to continually refresh our awareness and not lock onto any one thing.
The takeaway from all this is we always need to be learning as much as possible so our perceptions–not just our reasoning–can be better informed. When insight is baked into perception, it saves us a great deal of processing time and effort. Lifelong educational pursuits and an attitude of perpetual curiosity enhance our basic sensory capacities and thereby increase the meaningful data points available for consideration during any subsequent analysis.
It’s highly debatable that what we don’t know can’t hurt us, but there’s absolutely no question that what we don’t know can’t help us.
