Perception

In a com­mon­place envi­ron­ment at an inap­pro­pri­ate hour, do we per­ceive beauty? Do we stop to appre­ci­ate it? Do we rec­og­nize the tal­ent in an unex­pected con­text? A famous pub­lic exper­i­ment says we don’t and we see some­thing else. Sim­i­larly, we see pre-recorded images of real­ity daily, espe­cially when it comes to spir­i­tual life.

It was a cold Jan­u­ary morn­ing, 7:51 am. He emerged from the metro at the L’Enfant plaza sta­tion Wash­ing­ton D.C. and posi­tioned him­self against a wall beside a trash bas­ket. By most mea­sures, he was non­de­script: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Wash­ing­ton Nation­als base­ball cap. From a small case, he removed a vio­lin. Plac­ing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dol­lars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedes­trian traf­fic, and began to play.

He played six Bach pieces for about 45 min­utes. Dur­ing that time, since it was rush hour, it was cal­cu­lated that thou­sands of peo­ple went through the station.

Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a gov­ern­ment job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of fed­eral Wash­ing­ton, and these were mostly mid-level bureau­crats with those inde­ter­mi­nate, oddly fun­gi­ble titles: pol­icy ana­lyst, project man­ager, bud­get offi­cer, spe­cial­ist, facil­i­ta­tor, consultant.

Three min­utes went by and a mid­dle aged man noticed there was musi­cian play­ing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few sec­onds and then hur­ried up to meet his sched­ule. A minute later, the vio­lin­ist received his first dol­lar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and with­out stop­ping con­tin­ued to walk. A few min­utes later, some­one leaned against the wall to lis­ten to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most atten­tion was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hur­ried but the kid stopped to look at the vio­lin­ist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child con­tin­ued to walk turn­ing his head all the time. This action was repeated by sev­eral other chil­dren. All the par­ents, with­out excep­tion, forced them to move on.

In the 45 min­utes the musi­cian played, only 6 peo­ple stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but con­tin­ued to walk their nor­mal pace. He col­lected $32.17 — yes, some peo­ple gave pen­nies. When he fin­ished play­ing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

A pub­lic exper­i­ment on perception

As it hap­pens, no one but just one one per­son recog­nised Joshua Bell, one of the top musi­cians in the world, and she didn’t arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demog­ra­pher at the Com­merce Depart­ment, there was no doubt. She doesn’t know much about clas­si­cal music, but she had been in the audi­ence three weeks ear­lier, at Bell’s free con­cert at the Library of Con­gress. And here he was, the inter­na­tional vir­tu­oso, saw­ing away, beg­ging for money. She had no idea what was going on, but what­ever it was, she wasn’t about to miss it.

Joshua Bell played one of the most intri­cate pieces ever writ­ten, with a Stradi­vari vio­lin worth 3.5 mil­lion dol­lars. Two days before his play­ing in the sub­way, Joshua Bell sold out at a the­ater in Boston and the seats aver­age $100.

Joshua Bell play­ing incog­nito in the metro sta­tion was orga­nized by The Wash­ing­ton Post as part of a social exper­i­ment about per­cep­tion, taste and pri­or­i­ties of peo­ple. The out­lines were: in a com­mon­place envi­ron­ment at an inap­pro­pri­ate hour, do we per­ceive beauty? Do we stop to appre­ci­ate it? Do we rec­og­nize the tal­ent in an unex­pected context?

One of the pos­si­ble con­clu­sions from this expe­ri­ence could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and lis­ten to one of the best musi­cians in the world play­ing the most beau­ti­ful music ever writ­ten, how many other things are we missing?

Jour­nal­ist Gene Wein­garten was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Fea­ture Writ­ing for his out­stand­ing and thought pro­vok­ing analy­sis of the exper­i­ment. Wein­garten dis­cusses the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of Bell’s sub­way expe­ri­ence. What role does con­text play in our per­cep­tions? To what degree is our per­cep­tion of beauty influ­enced by our mind­set at the par­tic­u­lar time we per­ceive it? He notes:

It’s an old epis­te­mo­log­i­cal debate, older, actu­ally, than the koan about the tree in the for­est. Plato weighed in on it, and philoso­phers for two mil­len­nia after­ward: What is beauty? Is it a mea­sur­able fact (Got­tfried Leib­niz), or merely an opin­ion (David Hume), or is it a lit­tle of each, col­ored by the imme­di­ate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

Joshua Bell started his one-hour set with “Cha­conne” from Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Par­tita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the great­est pieces of music ever writ­ten, but one of the great­est achieve­ments of any man in his­tory. It’s a spir­i­tu­ally pow­er­ful piece, emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful, struc­turally per­fect. Plus, it was writ­ten for a solo vio­lin, so I won’t be cheat­ing with some half-assed ver­sion.” If you think that sounds effu­sive, con­sider what other com­poser, Johannes Brahms, had to say about the same piece of music in his let­ter to Clara Schu­mann (Robert Schumann’s wife):

“On one stave, for a small instru­ment, the man writes a whole world of the deep­est thoughts and most pow­er­ful feel­ings. If I imag­ined that I could have cre­ated, even con­ceived the piece, I am quite cer­tain that the excess of excite­ment and earth-shattering expe­ri­ence would have dri­ven me out of my mind.”

For Joshua Bell this was a tremen­dous expe­ri­ence. He noted:

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if some­one coughs or if someone’s cell­phone goes off. But here, my expec­ta­tions quickly dimin­ished. I started to appre­ci­ate any acknowl­edg­ment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grate­ful when some­one threw in a dol­lar instead of change.” This is from a man whose tal­ents can com­mand $1,000 a minute.

“The awk­ward times,” he calls them. It’s what hap­pens right after each piece ends: noth­ing. The music stops. The same peo­ple who hadn’t noticed him play­ing don’t notice that he has fin­ished. No applause, no acknowl­edg­ment. So Bell just saws out a small, ner­vous chord — the embar­rassed musician’s equiv­a­lent of, “Er, okay, mov­ing right along …” — and begins the next piece.

Watch­ing the video weeks later, Bell finds him­self mys­ti­fied by one thing only. He under­stands why he’s not draw­ing a crowd, in the rush of a morn­ing work­day. But: “I’m sur­prised at the num­ber of peo­ple who don’t pay atten­tion at all, as if I’m invis­i­ble. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”

Pre-conceptions in spir­i­tual life

But was Joshua mak­ing too much noise? There’s a sim­pler expla­na­tion for his doubt — peo­ple were observ­ing not Joshua ‘mak­ing noise’, but noise inside their own heads. Joshua was fac­ing a fun­da­men­tal truth of the real­ity we per­ceive: recorded see­ing. As quan­tum physi­cist says, “We don’t see what we see; we see what we remem­ber we see. And you can replace this phrase with smell, taste, hear, sense, and per­haps even think. When we see objects out there, we not only see them, we replay all the pre­vi­ous infor­ma­tion con­nected to them through past infor­ma­tion recordings.

Peo­ple didn’t expect a world class vir­tu­oso play­ing in the metro sta­tion in the cold morn­ing, for in their minds that place next to rub­bish bin was reserved for poor musi­cians play­ing for a few dol­lars. They’ve pro­jected a pre-recorded impres­sion in their minds and thus couldn’t reach new con­clu­sions, admire beau­ti­ful per­for­mance and gain new insights.

For major­ity places for admir­ing art are gal­leries, muse­ums, con­cert halls, not a metro sta­tion. Sim­i­larly, when it comes to spir­i­tu­al­ity peo­ple per­ceive anal­o­gous pre-recorded mes­sages and fol­low clichés. Many see spir­i­tu­al­ity as atten­dance to Sun­day mass or a tem­ple pro­gram, Christ­mas fes­tive and fast­ing before Easter, observ­ing Sab­bath or Jan­mas­tami, but not as a spon­ta­neous expres­sion of com­pas­sion, kind­ness and love in every­day envi­ron­ment. Or per­haps insights and inspi­ra­tion beyond those recorded in scripture.

In the case of Radha-Krishna devo­tion, they’re taught to expect it to see in a cer­tain Indian ambi­ent. Many will want to have a guru who has lots of fol­low­ers, who was born and/or resides in some Indian place of pil­grim­age, rather than a west­erner for exam­ple. Their mind will expe­ri­ence com­fort when it gets framed into the pre-sketched land­scape of secret mantras, strict daily rou­tine and com­pre­hen­sive set of rules to obey that will ‘set them free’. But their minds won’t be able to per­ceive a wider world of spon­ta­neous, nat­ural devo­tional expres­sion avail­able for free.

Peo­ple in the street danc­ing dressed in saf­fron and saris will be per­ceived as devo­tees, but many will smirk upon some­one in every­day jeans and shirt who say to be a devo­tee as well. Even if such an every­day per­son is per­ceived as a devo­tee, to many he or she will be of lesser degree and impor­tance than a monk in dress, and peo­ple will adjust their behav­iour accordingly.

Sub­jects out­side the pre-recorded per­cep­tual frame will be per­ceived sim­i­larly as Joshua Bell — as a poor musi­cian beg­ging for a few dol­lars to buy, per­haps, a hot soup in the cold Jan­u­ary morn­ing. An invis­i­ble nobody.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 20:23 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with devotion, Joshua Bell, Perception, pre-conception, quantum physics, recorded seeing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.