What Susan says about Sally, says more about Susan than about Sally.

– Anonymous

Great minds talk about ideas. Average minds talk about events. And small minds talk about people.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

As a kid I had a collection of Amar Chitra Katha. One of the stories that I read but did not understand until much, much later was something like this:

The story is set in a forest and there is a hermit lying face down. A thief passes by and mistakes the hermit to be a thief. Then a drunkard passes by and he mistakes the hermit to be a drunkard who has passed out. And finally another hermit passes by and he thinks of him as a great person and stops to press his legs, and then pays his respects and leaves. An owl who was watching all of this says at the end: we see in others what we are ourselves.

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In 2020, I listened to a podcast of Hidden Brain and in that Shankar Vedantam quotes from his own book. He says, at any given moment our eyes take in about a billion bits of information. This is too much for the brain to process, so only about a million bits of information is passed on to the brain. And of this million, the brain processes about 40. In other words, what you see with your mind’s eye is a tiny, tiny fraction of the reality.

So while it is not possible for our brains to process everything that is coming at us. Hence through evolution it has learnt to filter. It is not perfect, but it is operational and has helped us survive.

If you think about food, you will see a lot of desirable food. If you think about health, you will see healthy people in gyms. If you think about cars, you will see cars. And I think about risk and therefore I see a lot of people doing risky things and a few wise people that avoid it.

What we see depends on what our mind filters. Hence, what Susan says about Sally says more about Susan than about Sally.

(A question to think: if what people see and say depends on them, why do we care so much for other people’s opinions so much?)

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This was blog # 124. Blog # 50 was contributed by PJ, # 75 by Anshul Khare, # 100 by Ankit Kanodia. And so, keeping with this tradition the next blog #125 will be contributed by another special person.