First sight and second thoughts

“First sight and second thoughts” is a concept mentioned in some books by the late Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the famous Discworld series. Specifically, it is in the books about the young witch Tiffany Aching. My thoughts have been dwellng on it recently, so I decided to share it, in my own words.

First sight is to do with how our brains process the original, unfiltered visual information coming from our eyes to our brains. Each eye delivers a 2-dimensional map of colours of its field of vision, sharp and in full colour in the middle where the macula, an area of high-density receptors, is located. The colour information comes from three different types of receptors (cones), which the brain must integrate into a particular colour information. This is of course a very simplified explanation of how the eye and the macula work – but enough to make the point that the brain has a really huge amount of processing to do, since after all that primary processing of the stream of information from each eye, the process continues. The information from both eyes must be combined to add depth – and then the real fun starts…

The now complete map of colours and depths gets processed in the three stages:

• Awareness
  Sensory perception – noticing that something exists or is happening, but before any qualities are assigned to it. For example, you notice a four legged furry object with a head at the front and a tail at the back.
• Perception
  The original sensory perception is processed to a recognition, e.g. it’s a large pit bull dog with a drooling mouth.
• Consciousness
  This is where we start thinking about what we have perceived, e.g. OMG its huge and slavering at the mouth, those pit bulls are all aggressive fighters, I’m sure it will bite me!

Now let’s look at that example in terms of first sight. The perception is dependent on memory – if we did not know a fair amount about pit bulls and the range of their possible appearances, we could not have classified it as a pit bull. Come to that, if we had never seen a dog, we could not even have made that classification. Imagine that your sensory perception was of some object for which you had little or no previous reference, what then would the recognition process have offered? In all fairness it should offer: unknown. But we all know from our own experience that we don’t like not knowing about what’s facing us, after all, it might be dangerous. So often enough, we ‘recognise’ something which is in our memory and similar – a person we know (mostly corrected on more intense observation), a type of plant or bird familiar to us, or a particular facial expression which we have often seen before. First sight would mean here the willingness to let the recognition result be ‘unknown’.

But there’s a further depth to this topic: It’s when we don’t allow ourselves to recognise what is there – due to cultural conditioning, some trauma, some insistence on a particular world view in which what we are actually seeing would not be possible, or would be abhorrent. Or due to desire for something particular, for example we want to see a welcoming smile, so oversee that it is in fact a very strained smile¹. This type of phenomena can also be seen as an effect of the subconscious on perception.

The conscious reaction to a perception is even more likely to be conditioned. We’ve heard all about pit bulls, oh yes, and we for sure don’t want to end up in hospital. We could venture the idea that not using first sight is a type of defence mechanism to maintain our health and integrity. But first sight might have told us a lot of details which would have shown us what was really there: The dogs tail was wagging, the dog was not barking or jumping, in fact it was sitting looking at its owner, hoping for some food as the owner was just eating something, which might explain the drooling (pit bulls do have very large floppy lips and a lot of them drool in general).

Second thoughts can, if applied, easily catch such an error or misjustice. It might go like this: I notice a fearful reaction on my part – is it justified? So the second thoughts order a review of the situation, which result in the noticing of the waggy tail and the hope for some food, and we relax.

Second thoughts can be trained by practice. It just requires the will and courage to want to know what’s actually there. If you want to train the self-observation formally, you might try NLP.

On pit bulls

Exactly which breed or breeds is meant differs from country to country. According to Wikipedia, the pit bull was ‘created by crossing the ferocious, thickly muscled Old English Bulldog with the agile, lithe, feisty Black and Tan Terrier’, specifically for the sports of dog-fighting and rat-baiting. That’s a history in which the dogs themselves had no part, it’s something for which humans need to take responsibility. Apart from that, and as Wikipedia points out, there are very mixed views on pit bulls, with many seeing them as not at all so dangerous, or even as very loving, loyal and friendly dogs. I suspect that a large part of the aggressiveness which is observed can be attributed to their training as fighting dogs, which despite being prohibited in most countries, continues to this day. My own experience with the half pit bull, half terrier mix of a friend was of an exceedingly friendly and loving dog – something you can see on any number of Youtube videos.

¹ Energy-sensitive people, those who let the information flowing in from chakras and the aura fields be noticed consciously, would notice the strained attitude on that level, independent of the interpretation of facial features. Same applies to the energy coming from the dog