Pattern Blindness

The mind is a strange thing. It has so many coping mechanisms, as well as an ability to make itself blind to them. Sometimes you'll experience a flash of insight that makes you wonder how you could have missed it.

Think for a moment about something like a billboard. We ended up getting more of them back home. When it was novelty-new I heard the occasional gripe about the way the billboards cluttered up the view as people drove into town. Soon enough the discussions died down. A few short years later they barely register as I enter the town limits. Unless the message is really something eye-catching, it's like they're not even there. They've become visual static, noise that doesn't annoy or provoke brand awareness or an urge to purchase anything. Except perhaps the one that went up for the restaurant in a local casino, wherein the image the advertisers used is a waitress with looming 15-foot circumference boobs over the road. That does tend to draw the eye a bit more than something advertising a local bank with an awkward smile of a VP glaring at you in a creepy manner.

At work we have the honor of hearing all sorts of fire alarm tests. We've been hearing them for months. I'm not sure what they're testing for, but I do know that no one listens to them anymore. Just the other day I had my headphones on in my office when the garbled, staticky Peanuts-adult voice started belching from the speakers on the floor. At this point we just assume that unintelligible mess is a prelude to the wails of another alarm, and sure enough, the alarms go off. I don't think any employees pay attention anymore. Unless there is actual smoke and flames in sight, I'm pretty sure we're going to die from toxic gas buildup if there is an actual fire emergency. The constant annoying "tests" have made us immune to the alarm and announcements. It's static. Background noise.

What I'm trying to say is that when you get bombarded with similar stimuli all the time, the brain creates a kind of filter to make you numb to that stimuli. The only way to break through that awareness shield is to intentionally stop and analyze the situation, forcibly stripping the barriers your own brain put in place to protect you from overloading your senses with cruft and whatever is being sold on billboards.

How is this relevant to working in IT or programming? I have this theory that your brain makes certain assumptions based on experiences as to what should and shouldn't be filtered. You stop paying attention to the noise and instead look for the novel. Sometimes you experience the same problems enough that you learn to no longer pay attention to them, and in the process project them into the world at large. As if they learn and filter out the obvious as a source of problems. The obvious, though, is only obvious to you, and classified by your brain as a source of static to be selectively blinded from you.

This means that even though diagnosing a problem may be something elementary, because you have experienced it so many times that the repetition has made it the source of jokes, you may reach a point where you overlook the obvious because part of your brain tries jumping to the novel rather than the simple "most likely" cause. Sometimes you have to stop and reset your brain to see things from the beginning of the troubleshooting tree because it just doesn't want to check that the damn thing is plugged in.

Perspective. The best weapon against the brain's self-delusion coping mechanism.