Training Perceptive Skills

[holland]

Our brain uses symbolic shorthands when perceiving sensory information like sights and sounds for a reason, and by understanding its reasons, we can recognize what we need to do to improve the accuracy of our perception.

Firstly, it helps to protect the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by the complexities of the reality around it.

The actual facts of our environment are only experienced by the subconscious, which is trained to filter that information down to only what's actually useful to the conscious before passing it along.

This can actually be a genuine problem during perception training. As you start to see shapes and specific colors instead of symbols, it can be difficult to identify objects rapidly when driving and such. The brain needs to fully integrate both information formats, and the subconscious has to figure out what contexts in which it should send them.

This is why I discourage practicing perception training while you're in the wild.

It's best to clearly delineate your training session from your day-to-day perceptive needs:

• Have a set place where you practice these skills. Perferrably someplace well-lit with white light and a consistent working angle for visual perceptive training, or someplace with sensible acoustics and little background noise for auditory perception training. (More on this later.)
  
  
• Decide ahead of time how long you're going to be training for that session. It's a good idea to even set a timer, as you get the alarm at the end to tell you "hey, it's time to change modes."
  
  
• Stop the process when time's up. This is the most effective away to communicate to the subconscious that the session is over. If you don't commit and start slipping into percptive training outside the session, you're training yourself to always see or hear that way.

You'll eventually be able to mode switch anywhere at will, or juggle both simultaneously so that it's no longer needed. But in the interim, this makes it clear to your brain that these are two different modes of thinking from the start.

Don't be the guy who gets in an accident because he's admiring the yellows in the dappled light on the road instead of the yellow traffic light.

Secondly, our brains are trying to save us energy by not learning skills we don't actually need.

Unless you're making art, it doesn't really matter if the blue stripe on a building isn't actually blue, or that one shadow is actually darker than another on a different material.

You usually only need enough information to remember which building is at that corner for directional purposes, or that a shadow exists at all and has a shape to help identify the time of day.

And after ten or twenty or fifty years of reinforcing this to our brain, it's very difficult to convince the subconscious that we now need it to pass along super niche perceptive information. Our one little request is competing with countless well-developed pathways dedicated to doing the exact opposite.

As a result, it take some trickery to make the suconscious accept that this is genuinely useful information:

• We have to show we're actively using this perceptive skill by trying to do something with it ourselves first (i.e. do not rely on a tool to avoid the hard part) and doing so regularly (i.e. it can't just be a one-off activity or the pathways won't form).
  
  
• We have to add some stakes to the process, such as by trying to do it in a time limit and/or discarding failed attempts. This feeling of stress (and occassional succeess) identifies the lack of skill to the subconsncious as a problem that needs to be solved.
  
  
• We need to perceive the correction afterwards, in a timely manner, so it's clear which specific aspect of perception the subconscious needs to correct and what that correction is. This is where your "cheating" tools come back into play.

These combined factors form the foundation of a solid perceptive training practice.

I want to go more in-depth on the context your train in, though.

I mentioned that it helps to work at a consistent angle in a consistent lighting environment and such.

Ideally, the traits of this environment should match the environment you plan on working in when using that skill in the immediate future. This is because the context you train in will be the context your initial sense of perception is intrinsically tied to.

Eventually, you'll work and practice and exist in a variety of places, and your perceptive skills will become more universal and well-developed.

But it takes months or years to get to that point. So you can save yourself some headaches by training with the same image scale, table angle, light bulb, etc. that you work with to start.