An illusion that I think I’m living with is the relationship I have with my phone. My phone is a physical device that I own but am I really in control ? or does my phone control me ? There are all these lock-out esque apps or physical boxes that attempt to deal with this problem of being too addicted to your phone but I don’t think that’s a solution. I don’t think it addresses the root cause of the issue.
The thoughts that’ve been going through my head recently are what makes me want to open my phone the first thing in the morning. Or when I’m standing in line, or when I’m in the toilet. Why is it almost a natural instinct to reach into my pocket and mindlessly open up my phone. I feel like a majority of the time there is no real purpose to opening my phone, as in i haven’t received any notification but rather I’m just doing it because i want to consume some kind of content. The reason i care about this or rather the reason iI think this might be my illusion is because it’s a little scary that a device has this kind of control over me.
I think maybe a possible way to look at the impact of how often I use my phone is doing some sort of check on what I’m looking at. What apps am i opening up when i wake up in the morning Like look at the purpose and potentially track the first app when I’m opening up my phone.
Whats real, Whats not, We obviously cant doubt everything that comes through our head. If we did that we’d be realllllllly slow at doing anything. Just like with the eye example we all have our blind spots. How can I become a better thinker / person / creator / designer and focus on empathy when trying to identify these blind spots.
So what’s actually crazy - Our brains are great, like actually so complex, like can figure out how to catch a ball in mid-air type smart. But when we present it with a simple optical illusion like the one below we still can’t unsee it. We know A and B are the exact same shade. I could tell my brain that a 100 times and even then I wouldn’t be able to physically see that they’re different.
Why do cops can confuse people removing wallets from their pockets with people reaching for guns. How much of it is just a person being being shitty to be shitty but just years of internal bias. How can we use tech to identify these biases.
You can’t completely remove bias from the brain. You can’t change the fact that we’ve all grown up in different worlds - But you can encourage people to listen to other perspectives and be curious about the veracity of their own.