Categories, genres, types, labels, buckets, boxes. Whatever you call them we love to put everything and everyone into something. It is the only way for our mind to manage the incredible amount of data and information that we gather in any moment. Our brain is notoriously lazy, so it doesn’t like to deal with the complexity of the world we live in. Using buckets or boxes is an easy and efficient way to manage this complexity. Once we get in touch with something — a piece of information, an object or a person — we immediately try to fit it into one of the buckets we have built in our mind. Everyone has his personal buckets and his own rules to put things into them. A lot of these buckets and rules come from the context in which we grew up. They are part of the cultural biases we develop in our life. They aren’t intrinsically good or bad. But it’s important to be aware of their existence. Being aware of our biases can help us in at least two ways. The first is to avoid the risk of transforming these buckets into cages. These categories exist only in our head and are meaningful only to ourselves. The reality is much more complex. If we are not aware of our biases, we may end up thinking that what we perceived is all there is to perceive. What a loss.
One Apple A Day #113
One Apple A Day #113
One Apple A Day #113
Categories, genres, types, labels, buckets, boxes. Whatever you call them we love to put everything and everyone into something. It is the only way for our mind to manage the incredible amount of data and information that we gather in any moment. Our brain is notoriously lazy, so it doesn’t like to deal with the complexity of the world we live in. Using buckets or boxes is an easy and efficient way to manage this complexity. Once we get in touch with something — a piece of information, an object or a person — we immediately try to fit it into one of the buckets we have built in our mind. Everyone has his personal buckets and his own rules to put things into them. A lot of these buckets and rules come from the context in which we grew up. They are part of the cultural biases we develop in our life. They aren’t intrinsically good or bad. But it’s important to be aware of their existence. Being aware of our biases can help us in at least two ways. The first is to avoid the risk of transforming these buckets into cages. These categories exist only in our head and are meaningful only to ourselves. The reality is much more complex. If we are not aware of our biases, we may end up thinking that what we perceived is all there is to perceive. What a loss.