How We See Things

Many years ago I went to a concert given by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. As the musicians came on stage, I was amazed that the orchestra was mostly women. I was not alone. I heard someone sitting near me exclaim, "My G-d, this orchestra is all women."

At that moment I decided to count and see how many there actually were. As it turns out, the percentage of women was 49%, less than half. So how do we explain the mistaken impression that the orchestra was mostly women?

It seems pretty simple. Those of us who are familiar with orchestras know they are overwhelmingly male. Since we expect to see at least 19 men to every woman, something that approaches a one-to-one ratio appears to us as more than what it actually is.

As numerous experiments have proven, two eyewitnesses to an event can come up with very different versions of the facts. Neither of them is lying, they just saw things differently.

What we see is naturally colored by who we are, what we've experienced, and any pre-conceived ideas we may have.

This is my seventh posting to this blog. The first was a short post about nothing. Three were about politics. One was about cultural differences, although it touched on religion. Only the most recent one was truly religious in nature.

Yet someone asked why everything is about my faith. Two people see the same things, and see them totally differently. Is my view so colored by my belief in G-d that I don't even recognize when it creeps into my writing? Is his view so colored by his views (lack of belief?) that he sees more religion than actually exists, just as I saw more women in the orchestra than were actually there?

How much of what we see in life is what is really there, and how much is a product of what we want to see?