A coworker brought in a picture of her young grandchildren surrounded by toys in the living room. As she showed me the photo, she pointed to one of the toys and said "What do you think that is?" I said, "It looks like some kind of Frisbee."
"That's what everyone has been saying," she said.
After I suggested that it was a Frisbee, she told me that when she had asked her granddaughter what it was, she simply said "An orange circle."
This story shows how two people can look at the same thing, but think about it differently based on one's past experiences and acquired vocabularies. I just thought this was interesting because it shows that sometimes larger vocabularies lead us to complicate or overlook a very simple description for a simple item.
Excuses, excuses: why I dread writing
17 years ago
2 comments:
good point! i remember taking some mock iq tests where they had a question that depicted a black circle with little black lines coming out of it and it was multiple choice so the answers were a.) the sun b.) a spider etc, and it seems like the test wanted us to use our imagination or was drawing some sort of answer out of us. so our minds might be conditioned to always make something out of practically nothing, i mean it was just a black circle with black lines around it.
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