Conceptual Blind Spots

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's invention of the phonautograph in the 1850s, he was guided by a powerful metaphor: "writing waves instead of words." This stenography-inspired vision led to the breakthrough of recording sound—yet simultaneously blinded him to the possibility of playback. Scott could only imagine humans learning to "read" sound waves like shorthand, not hearing them reproduced.

This pattern repeats across domains.

A brilliant student, having learned filter theory through time and voltage visualizations, found himself unable to apply the same concepts when the independent variable became energy. "The better we inculcate the basic idea with the pictures drawn by the professor," Richard Hamming goes, "the more we prevent the student from later extending the ideas to completely new areas." Our mental models are both ladders and cages—they elevate our thinking in specific directions while often imprisoning us from seeing alternative possibilities.

Phædrus read about the "green flash" of the sun in a yachting book. He wondered why he'd never seen it before. "He was sure he had never seen the green flash of the sun," writes Robert Pirsig in Lila. "Yet he must have seen it." The explanation, Pirsig writes, was a "static filter"—Phædrus hadn't seen the green flash because he'd never been told to see it. But after reading that book, which said, in effect, to go see it, he did. "And he saw it. There was the sun, green as green can be, like a 'GO' light on a downtown traffic semaphore." All his life, the phenomenon had been right there in front of him. "The culture hadn't told him to so he hadn't seen it. If he hadn't read that book on yachting he was quite certain he would never have seen it." We see what we're told to see. We notice what we've been instructed to notice. The world reveals itself not just to those who look, but to those who know what to look for.