All That We Perceive

Posted on | March 9, 2010 | 2 Comments

Perception.

It is “the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind,” at least, according to the dictionary. When we taste, touch, see, smell or hear, we are perceiving. Every day, our perceptions lead us to make certain conclusions: she has brown eyes, he is bald, the water is cold, the traffic is noisy, the ice cream is sweet. We trust our perceptions because we trust our senses and our mind. We believe in what we perceive.

But perception isn’t always the truth and more often than not, our mind and our senses can play tricks on us, coaxing us into believing one thing when the truth is something much different.

Last week, PBS aired the final episode of Faces of America, a series in which historians and researchers traced the family histories of 12 prominent Americans. For many of the guests, documents and records provided an extensive amount of material. Eventually though, no matter how well recorded our histories are, the paper trail does run out.

When that happened, the researchers of this series then turned to DNA, to see what each guest’s genes could reveal about their ancestry and ethnicity. In some cases, the results were predictable, but in others, the outcomes were surprising – and were enough to make even the guest themselves question their perceptions.

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet and college professor, the chair of the African-American Studies Department at Yale University and recited a poem at President Obama’s inauguration. By all outward appearances (and by her own self-identification), Alexander is African-American. When she was presented with the results of her genetic admixture test, however, she – and the viewers – were surprised to discover that her ancestry is 66% European / White (in fact, she is directly descended from King John I of England through his mistress). Likewise, Eva Longoria, who self-identifies as Mexican, has 70% European / White ancestry (most likely Spanish) and not, as she often thought, a majority of indigenous Mexican ancestry.

If we based our perceptions of Alexander and Longoria solely on their outward appearance, we would come to one conclusion. But their DNA, the very stuff that dictates what they look like on the outside, tells a far greater – and much more complicated – story.

It’s a profound lesson in perception – and of the assumptions we make based on those perceptions. We are often so certain that we know, without a doubt, that x means this and y means that. The larger, often unseen and unknown truth tells us that there is quite a bit we don’t know, that perceptions cannot possibly tell the whole story and that there’s a very good chance we’re wrong more often than we’re right.

We’re so quick to judge based on what we see visually on the outside. The historical idea of race developed, in part, because of perceived differences in physical appearance. History is littered with stories and reports of discrimination, marginalization and violence – many of which came about because one person didn’t look like another.

We trust our perceptions more than we should sometimes. We willingly accept the literal face value of someone or something with little thought to what may lie beneath. We take in someone’s physical appearance, we read his or her last name, we hear his or her voice – and we make assumptions. But there is always so much more to know.

The perceptions we gather from our senses only tell one side of the story. As the PBS series demonstrated, our DNA can hold some surprising truths about who we think we are – and who we think other people are. And this idea applies far beyond physical appearance as well. Perceptions about personality, belief, opinions, behavior – all of these are aspects that make us who we are and all are much more complicated than our perceptions would have us believe.

Our senses are what ties us to reality. We use the things we smell, taste, touch, hear and see to orient ourselves and place ourselves in this place, at this time. Most of us assume our senses are infallible, that they will always tell us what we need to know, but the truth is much greater. All that we perceive is not the final story – there still is and always will be so much more to know.

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