Seeing what we are conditioned to see

Wink traces the disciples’ blindness to “an interest-conditioned and experience-conditioned manner of seeing and hearing and reacting.” He compares it to experiments where the subjects wore stereopticons, allowing them to see two different pictures simultaneously, one for each eye. The subjects described seeing only the picture familiar to their cultural conditioning. He reports:

When a picture of a baseball player was flashed to one eye and a bullfighter to the other, Mexicans reported seeing the bullfighter and North Americans saw the baseball player. Subjects shown an anomalous red six of spades will experience vague physical discomfort but identify it as a six of spades. We tend to see what we are trained to see, not what is there.

/

/

NIV Application Commentary on Mark