We will always try to make meaningful perceptions in a seemingly random setting. This is one thing that is right now a major differentiator between humans and bots, so that captchas rely on how well we can perceive something in an image. Gestalt in German language means shape or form and a branch of psychology that deals with perceiving things is called Gestalt psychology. Due to this ability, we have grouped random set of stars in different places as constellations; we perceive a human smile when we use a colon and a bracket.

When we take an eye test, the optometrist writes down the values for how well we can see. It is technically called visual acuity test. Visual acuity values determines what glasses you need to wear to have a normal vision. Similar to visual acuity, our ability to perceive things from seemingly random settings is called perceptual acuity. Sadly there is no way to measure one’s perceptual acuity but increase in that is directly related to business success.

On our day to day life our ability to form hypotheses based on our perceptions, testing it out and holding on strongly to validated hypotheses contributes to our growth. Our ability to come up with hypotheses is directly proportional to the way we perceive our world. Our perceptions become better only when we expand our interests to a wide variety, not just the in the field of work we are involved.

All the time we spend time on sports, current affairs, politics, technology, music and many more will collectively help improve the way we perceive our world. Of course spending dedicated deliberate effort on a field makes one an expert in that field, but that makes someone a doer not a creator; we need to be an expert in a field as well as be able to create something. Our world is a perpetual puzzle, those who solve larger pieces gets the better reward.

Image courtesy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/double-m2/