Perceiving is not just hearing, seeing and listening. The person who learns to perceive with the heart is the one who knows how to go further, the one who feels, the one who knows how to listen without judgment, look without filter, taste life in all its essences and touch reality to experience it. . This sensitive skill, strange as it may seem, is not something everyone can practice.
Few areas of psychology are as crucial and at the same time fundamental as the study of perception, the way in which we capture everything that surrounds us and how we organize and interpret this information undoubtedly determines part of who we are and how we interact with others.
- It was in the nineteenth century that famous psychologists and physiologists.
- Such as Johannes Peter Muller or Gustav Theodor Fechner.
- Began to study all these dynamics between stimuli and perception.
- As well as the minimum thresholds from which we experienced a sensation.
- A while ago it was thought that perception was purely biological.
- That is.
- That what we experience would be determined only by the stimulus itself.
- Regardless of dimensions such as our memory.
- Our learning or our previous experiences.
However, this approach has changed. We now know for sure that the art of perceiving depends on many different and varied factors: our motivation, our emotions, our culture, our intuition, our past experiences, our expectations . . . So much so that if there is one thing we all know, it is that everyone perceives the world one way or another, to the point that sometimes one can differentiate whether a color is navy blue or purple or if what a child feels is angry or afraid.
All this leads us to a conclusion: there are people who look but do not see, there are people who listen but do not listen, and there are also those who are unable to go beyond what perceives mere vision, depriving themselves of a world. of fantastic nuances appreciated only by those who know how to perceive with their hearts.
If we asked a group of people now how much sense human beings make, chances are 90% of them will say it’s five. We all learned from an early age what Aristotle had already collected in his day with the book “De Anima”. In this work, the author explains that human beings receive information from the world through hearing, taste, smell, sight and touch.
But is it fascinating to know that we actually have more than 20 senses with their correspondents?Subsentful? (how to perceive the bitter, sweet taste, etc. ). Thus, to all the senses already known, we must add, for example, others such as kinesthesia, propioception, thermocomposition, nociception, the sense of echolocation or the Sense of surveillance All open up a fantastic variety of possibilities where we can better adapt to our environment.
But it is important to note that not everyone develops them in the same way or at the same level. Scientists at the University of Washington, for example, tell us that “feeling alert” often has a very different threshold for each person. those who have no sense of danger or who have, for example, too much confidence in which they are rarely able to anticipate certain things.
On the other hand, other people have a kind of “internal radar”, a sixth sense that warns them that certain people or situations are not safe. This sense, in fact, is located in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, an area that is responsible for keeping us alert to a strange or different situation to allow us to make a decision as quickly as possible.
To perceive with the heart has to do with sensitivity and personal openness, it is the ability not only to keep what the senses convey to us, is to apply the will, the feeling, the empathy and the intuition to achieve deeper interpretations. this kind of perception as “art” is so sublime for a very specific reason: it allows us to be more aware of things, nature, people, our reality.
It is important to say that applying this type of perception is not easy, it is not easy because it requires several processes: inner calm, skill for the present, ability not to make quick judgments, good self-knowledge and, above all, acceptance. . Because becoming aware sometimes means having to assume that we can’t change many things we see. We have to accept people, for example, as they are and, on that basis, implement certain responses or actions.
Perceiving with the heart is also one of the highest skills that we can develop the human being, the reason is that more than ever we can tune our senses with emotions, with experience, objectivity and with this love that invites us to see the world through glasses. respect, affection and consideration.
So let us begin to practice this kind of sensory and emotional openness so that we can perceive what surrounds us with a more complete consciousness, with greater openness and, above all, with more heart.