L.O.G. 108 Do you see what I see

Hey, everyone! Thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, I'm the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content on there if you're already a subscriber, and a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead, leave them below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like and subscribe, follow us on Facebook at HBP&RNA. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis. So, please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show.

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So be prepared for that. I'll come in with a basso profundo. Oh, let me know when it says "going live." It should. And we are! Oh, we're live. So we're going to go ahead and get started. We're recording this on a Friday morning. And those of you tuning in audio, once again, I'll put my link in the episode details. You can always follow me on there, and you can follow along live when we pop up here on Facebook from time to time. Some of these we do live and get some interaction, which is great. Sometimes the interaction is horrible. Sometimes it's just my buddy Dan hitting on me, but it could be a number of things.

So today, we are kind of sticking around the topic of vision in a sense, right? So, there's a lot out there, and we discussed a lot of times different types of biases that humans have for different things that kind of cause us to misinterpret or interpret events incorrectly or not fully. And then our brain kind of folds and fills in the details because it wants a complete picture. We talk about that stuff a lot, and it's because it's powerful and it affects all of us, and there's not a whole lot we can do about it other than getting a better understanding of it.

But kind of today, before you even get to those biases of how you process information and how you infer certain things, you got to kind of start with your vision, right? Meaning how you actually see, what you actually see, because it's not as great as we think it is. Meaning, not only is our vision not as good as we think it is, but our actual entire eyesight in general, and our field of view and what we can actually take in, it's so much smaller. Which is why it's hard to get some of these details and how to see certain things, especially in chaotic situations. But really, just in general, I'm talking every day in life, we see a lot less than we actually do. So, that'll be the kind of good explanation, I think, Greg, to start with. But I'd like to kind of throw to you to kind of jump right into this and talk a little bit about the eye so that we have a good working, some terms to work with, some left and right lateral limits, some a better understanding of how we actually process our environment.

No, I love that, Brian. And welcome, everybody, because it is live. And Brian, what's the name of this episode again? "Do You See What I See?" Do you see what I got? Oh, God, the Star, Star. Well, it's just Christmas, buddy, and you know what? Folks, you might not know this, but in addition to my parkour skills, I am a professional caroler. So, dressing in the outfit is Ebenezer himself.

So, Marren, I want to tell you a quick street story just so people don't think that we're going to be so technical today that we're going to blow them away. So, you know very well, Shelly and I had the Powderhorn Ranch for 13 years in addition to all our cop work and our consulting and teaching and training. Yeah, we would go out there, and on one side of the valley, Shelly would lead the Jeep tours into the high country. Other side of the valley, I would, or the horse tours on the other side of the valley, I would be leading the Jeep tours. So, Shelly's up there going, "Look, a doe, a deer, a female deer! Look at the golden eagle!" and all that stuff.

Well, on the Jeep tours, right? So, we're getting into areas that are about the primitive wilderness. And so, I would drive along, and I drive, and I talk, and I do everything at the same rate of speed that I do right now. So, I pull up, I go, "There's an elk. Okay, take a look, there's an elk, kind of left." And you'd see that. And I drive a little further, and I go, "Oh, a moose." And then I would drive a little further and I would say, "A bighorn sheep." Well, we used to call that on the Jeep tour the "trifecta." You know, you get to see all those animals in an hour, and then come back at the ranch and have a great lunch or something.

So, about three Jeep tours into the season, Nico, our son, comes up to me, and he's a little taught back then, you know, the entertainment director for the ranch. He goes, "Hey, I don't want to be a dick, Dad, but nobody is seeing what you're seeing." "Like, what are you talking about?" He goes, "You stop, you're pointing it out, you're all animated and excited, so they get excited. But then you drive on, and they didn't even bring their cameras." What it took is me to think, "What are they missing?"

Well, listen, if you've run a ranch, if you're a hunter, or you're a fisherman, or you're out in the woods all the time, you see things differently. You see things that other people don't see. They say, "Hey, a chipmunk!" And you go, "Look out!" because the chipmunk's there because there's a bear working through the woods behind you. And he's silent, and he's got smell sensors seven times that of your dog, and can sense the environment, knows you're there even though you have no idea he's there.

So, what I had to do, Brian, is I had to slow time down, give them, myself, to give the time and distance. I'd stop, shut off the Jeep, and I'd go, "Everybody look about 300 meters to your left. You'll notice that rock formation. Now, does everybody see the dead part of that pine tree? Good. Look down and look to the left. Those things right there, those are mule deer." And everybody would go, "Holy crap!" The scales would fall from their eyes.

Brian, why do you have to call people on things? Because we have a thing called Central Vision, and our Central Vision, run by our Fovea Centralis, is our keen Central Vision. It's that stuff that goes "whoop," and all of a sudden we focus in on something. And because the animals don't move or they move very little, specifically when they think they're being watched, your Peripheral Vision, which is supposed to be the big end of the funnel, Brian, to drive your Central Vision, isn't working. Does that make sense? So, what I had to do is I had to jump-start these urbanites and get them a feeling for the woods. And then once I showed them that first elk, guess what? They're going, "Oh, is that an elk?" "Oh, yes, that is." "What about that?" "No, that's a moose." You know, "At what altitude do deer turn into elk?" And I don't answer all those stupid questions.

But, Brian, that's the key. Is that how that works? I think it is, but that's the key to even being a good intel analyst or surveillance person or human resources person, right? If you don't know what to look at in your environment, and more importantly, how to see it, then you're going to miss those cues.

Well, yeah, I think it applies to everything. I mean, it applies to driving your car down the street, seeing what's going on. And it's always good to bring this up, and I know we kind of like are the ones saying like, "Yeah, we suck a lot more than we realize sometimes," that it's doom and gloom. And it's not that we're trying to point out everything that's wrong. It's a lot of this is, or most of it, or all of it, is based in survival, right? It means we are, we're biologically, physiologically, psychologically, even primed for survival, and we want to survive and survive the species. But that's kind of where this strong Central Vision comes in. So, although we're looking out and we think we have this 1080, whatever, 720, I don't know what we're up to, 4K vision, streaming out, and we have 180— I have no idea what any of those words mean, but I know everybody's following along is going, "Yes, you're right!"

But even though we think that, and that's how we say it, it's actually a lot smaller, right? So, when you talk about strong Central Vision, and this gets into then how we then perceive events and what we choose to focus on, and that's what we choose to focus on is a very, very primal decision. We're not consciously really making that decision, right? So, when it gets into that, just like you're saying, and that's about the mule deer story. We have a kind of similar one. You know, that was my whole thing because I'm born and raised, grew up in Chicago, and then didn't spend a lot of time, a little bit in the woods, but never—

When you were running from somebody?

Yeah, yeah. Or the Dan Ryan Woods on the south side or somewhere. That's funny. We were just kids drinking beer, same thing. But it would say one of my buddies that, you know, I was in a sniper team with and lives in Michigan. We went there one time, and I was like, "You know, dude, can we hunt a deer or something like that?" He's like, "Well, first of all, it's already, like, it's noon and we're drunk, so probably not right now." But then he went over, and he had— but I made him do that exactly. Like, he had fake deer out there. He said, "All right, this is where you want to aim for it. This is how you look." I said, "Put it out there so I can see it!" You know what I'm saying? Like, "I need to see it in the environment, okay?"

And then we walked through a field, and I had this big giant .44 magnum revolver with a little scope on it, which is not the ideal weapon system for hunting that creature. And I took one shot at one that I saw was a little over 100 yards away and just narrowly missed. But, you know, it was a revolver, so, you know, don't fault me on that, folks. It's listening.

And that's called an excuse!

No, no, I can't see because we were driving down the road going 50 miles an hour, and he's like, "Oh, I see the deer out there!" And I'm like, "No, no, what are you talking about?" And because they blended in with their environment. Now, I, understanding training as a sniper, understanding negative space and how to burn through things and not just focus on what you see right in front of you, but actually look into the forest. Once you start doing that, you can see.

Pattern management.

Yeah. Go ahead.

No, I just want to say, that point is well taken. How many times do we go, and we're teaching the super secret squirrels of the world, and we tell them, "We're not going to tell you what to look for. We're going to teach you how to look." That's what he did. What he did is he framed your environment in a way that you could pull lenses to increase or decrease the sensitivity of what it was you were searching for.

Okay. So, getting into what you can and can't see and Central Vision, kind of explain a little bit at strong Central Vision, because, you know, you're always the one that said, "Hey, men have roughly six degrees Functional Field of View, and women have like almost twice that, around 11 degrees."

Eleven degrees.

But which comes to like about a quarter held at arm's length. And my analogy that I use is, you know, people talk about tunnel vision, and chaotic events where it's stressful and all they can see is right in front of them, and "I have this tunnel vision." And the way I think it's usually explained incorrectly, right? Because I'm the one who says, "That's technically all you can ever see." Meaning, that is what your Central Vision is. The rest is visual perceptual, filled up by your brain. But explain that. What exactly is this strong, what you call, Functional Field of View?

You're so spot-on here. So, let's make things simple for the audience because when people try to talk about brain or brain chemistry or vision, what they do is they pack so much information into that little thumb drive of your brain that you get disinterested and walk away. And that's why I never got trigonometry. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So, it never matters, and I never will.

So, Marren talked about a quarter. If you don't have a quarter in your pocket, like most of the Americans that I know, no one does how to work on COVID, use your thumbnail. So, if you hold your thumbnail as far as you can from your snout— and like, look, I'm lining up on my head if you're watching; if you're not at home, hold it as far as you can out there— the idea is, your thumbnail's about the size of a normal human Functional Field of View. Stop. Why is that important? There's 360 degrees in a circle. You can remember that if you're seeing this live by looking at the size of my head. I got a perfectly round head. If I had three holes in it, you could grab it like a ball and not its own weather system, but it really does, it has an orbit. But if you draw on a piece of paper or on your yellow pad or whatever you're driving with at home, a circle, think about the little wedge that would be a six-degree or an 11-degree. So, you have all the rest of that, which is a big number, that you don't see anything with.

So, your vision is triggered by your environment. And the environmentals that trigger it are light, motion, and edges. Light, motion, and edges. If you're absent those, in other words, if you have the light and you have the edges, but you don't have the motion, then things disappear. Now, so, let's take that back to your hunting analogy real quick before I go into that. That distinct Central Vision. People go hunting all the time, and people sit and sit and sit, and they watch the same little section of woods waiting for an animal. It's an ambush attack, basically, what it is. And you're waiting for the animal to come in. And then a person will say, "All of a sudden, I looked to my left, and here the deer was 15 feet from me, and he came out of nowhere!" Nothing comes out of nowhere. What it is is those animals moved so discreetly in their environment, they're so clandestine, without even thinking about it, that you missed the motion. So, the light and edges were present, but your peripheral didn't go, "Danger, warning, Will Robinson, a deer approaching!"

So, the idea is, your strong Central Vision, look, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah, you're hardwired for Central Vision. It helps you read. As a matter of fact, without it, you can't read. You can't read. But either God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah said, "Hey, listen, we know that man is going to evolve to reading stage," or it was put on for survival— much more likely, folks, way back then. And the idea is this, Brian: If something is in my environment and it's moving through the brush, I need to orient towards that. Why do I need to orient? Because it brings my eyes, the most important of my senses, to bear on that area. My ears are designed in correlation with my eyes to give me an audio feedback. That's why they got the big shells that are on the side of my head. And then my nose, where's my snout? Right under my eyes. So, all of a sudden, I can smell, and I smell a decaying flesh. Uh-oh, mountain lion! Do you see where I'm going?

No, no, this is, this is where it gets into how, what, what this is what we're getting into today is how just your vision alone affects your behavior, right? So, you just said it right there. So, I have my eye, at a very primal level, attracted to light, motion, and edges. I see something over there. Now, think about that. If everyone's just think, you know, you're listening or watching along, just think about any time you've seen someone look at something and then turn and move towards it. So, what you have is what we call that Functional Field of View, and then orientation. So, you've oriented in that direction, meaning whatever is over there is now the most important thing to you and your environment. So, this is how your eye basically works to link and basically get you to change your behavior, and that's strong, and it's significant, right? So, meaning it's a significant observation.

Significant.

So, let's go to a school shooting, Brian.

First of all, everybody, this is your Fovea Centralis. It's a small window that's at the back of your visual field, and it's the one that's absorbing the light, motion, and edges. Functional Field of View is the left and right lateral limits of that Fovea Centralis, the central focus. Now, all of a sudden, you're in class and you heard a loud noise, and people will say, "Wow, was that a balloon popping?" Do you get what I'm saying? Because we don't have a file folder for shots being fired in the echoed chambers of the school. But all of a sudden, you look down and you see by the gym that somebody's orienting towards something. Their hands drop, their mouths open, and now they're visually focus-locked. They've got tunnel vision on something. You better look where they're looking because their orientation, they're freezing in that moment. Fight, flight, or freeze is very important to your survival.

So, take it out of the school shooting. You're human resources. You want to find out what people are doing when they're around at the smoker's pit. Watch their orientation. Do you get what I'm saying? Parents, you want to see if your kid's lying to you. So, Brian, everything is built off of that flame of how you use your five senses to sense-make your environment, and vision is so incredibly powerful, especially for humans, right?

So, like, you, you talked about earlier, animals, these are more reliant on scent than they are on sight. And actually, you brought up even bears; that's basically how they, their sense of time in a lot of animals, is linked to smell. Like, when you smell, "Oh, that's a rotting corpse," they go, "Oh, that's a rotting corpse that's been dead for about a day and a half now." Like, they have a very, very precise one. But back to our vision, and you know, there's a term out there that's used almost as like a metaphor and sometimes an analogy, and they call it "blind spots," right? Like, "Oh, I have a blind spot in the way I think," or, "I didn't see things like that." When someone will make a comment, and another group will get upset over that, like, "Hey, do you realize what you're saying?" And then that person goes, "Oh, crap! Like, I had no idea it meant this to you when I said that." "That was a blind spot I had." And there's all kinds of great papers and research and whatever. Go to grad school and do all that stuff.

But there's the literal blind spots we have. We don't even talk about that. And so, discuss that a little bit because you talk about how the eye works and the Fovea Centralis, and you have an optic nerve in the back of your eye, which is literally the very center of your vision coming out. Things are coming in upside down and backwards. And you're more, so what we talk about, blind spots. And they affect us hugely. Especially like driving is a great example of how blind spots work. But can you kind of explain how we have, of course, blind spots that we need to figure out?

So, the greatest thing is, if you're at home right now and you're already mowing on something, go to your fridge and take out a hard-boiled egg. We used to travel with Man Mountain Blackheart, also known as Eric Collier, our Sergeant-at-Arms. And Collier would eat two dozen eggs in the morning, all hard-boiled. And we'd have to drive around him with the rental sled. Figure that out, folks, we'll talk about your bio in a while. But reach into your egg drawer and take out a hard-boiled egg. First thing is, take it out of the shell. The shell is a protective outer layer. Then take a look at the egg, and the egg is not unlike the consistency of your eyeball. If now you look at that and leave it out on the counter for a little while and roll it around like your eyes are rolling around in your head, will you notice his minor imperfections in the white part of the egg? Each one of those imperfections grow and stay with you and harden over your life. And therefore, looking at the egg from the inside, that's part of the way that you're processing information. Each one of those aberrations inside of your visual field are going to cause a blind spot that you learn to live with.

You know, you said it great, we were in a class once and the kid didn't get it, and you said, "Hey, you ever take your Oakleys or your Ray-Bans and you take them out on the range and all of a sudden you've got a scratch on them, and you're like ready to hang yourself? You go, 'Oh my God, I scratched my [glasses]!'" But in a week, guess what? You're not even seeing the scratch anymore. You learn to live with that, that damage in your vision.

But I will go further, Brian. Now take a pen at your desk, or if you drive and pull over and grab a pen and stick it in the back of that egg. That right there is your optic nerve that's coming away from your eye. Well, the optic nerve makes a big old [hole] in there, and guess what? You're not seeing anything in that area where you don't have Central Vision, right? The light, motion, and edges are absent. So, your brain can't walk around saying, "I've got this big black piece of poster board in the center of my field of vision." So, you know what it does? It takes and breaks down the rest of the pixelation around you and makes up what's most likely there.

And people right now are going, "That's not true!" And I would say, next time you hit your spell check on your Mac, especially for a name, it's going to say, "This is the name. Yes or no, that you want to change the name. Keep it or change it." And the last one option it gives you, Brian, is "guess." Guess which is correct? Guess what? It works on the search engine, it works on the context. So, your eye and your brain does the same thing. What you can't see in that Central Vision and that very small part of your Fovea Centralis and Functional Field of View, Brian, your brain makes up based on the context and the likely relevance. That's where Human Behavior Pattern Recognition comes in because you see what you see every day, and that's why danger vision, what we're talking about today, is so critical to understand.

Right. And that's why I always use the term, "You see what you want to see, you hear what you want to hear, you believe what you want to believe," and it's despite what's actually happening in front of you. And, yep, I mean, that's what, does this blow? Well, this is, this is why I mean it in a very, very literal sense of what you can see. I don't care about your ideology, or your upbringing, or your environment, or whatever else, like, or your these different cognitive biases. I'm talking about, like, this is really, really difficult. Then you throw in other environmental factors, like, "Oh, now it's night time." Okay, well, we are, we, our night vision sucks, right? We are not primed to see well at night, and so it takes a different part of that.

So true.

But this leads into why, to the reason why we're kind of discussing the eye as it relates to human behavior, is just at a very, you know, at a very scientific level of how your eye works before you get into what you believe or think. I mean, you're already getting corrupt images sometimes coming in, so to speak.

So, Brian, you know the movie My Cousin Vinny? You know how I'm a fan of the movie My Cousin Vinny. And anybody that's Brian's age or younger has never heard of it.

No, no, I've seen it. Music or something.

But rent My Cousin Vinny because there's two scenes that you got to understand. One is about the brain and one is going to be about vision. And very briefly, there's a scene where the sheriff, who played D-Day on Animal House, is the southern country sheriff, and he's in the cell and he's talking to the kid that was a Karate Kid, and he says, "So, yeah, you murdered the counter guy." And he goes, "I murdered the counter guy! I, I murdered the guy!" And so later, the lady in the court's testimony, "I murdered it." Well, listen, it's all in context and relevance. It came out, sounded like you murdered it.

More important to vision, Brian, there's an actor named Rainer Shine— Rainer Shine, which is a great name, by the way, and I'll look him up. Rainer Shine, bearded guy, old guy, in a thousand movies. He's sitting there. Not only does he have crappy glasses, but the pictures are taken from his living room towards the, whatever the place was, "stopping the whistle stop stopping," something like that. So, which the attorney looks and he goes, "What are these things right here behind the bushes?" And he finally gets them to say, "Those are the windows." And he shows how dirty the windows are. And he goes, "Hey, between the distance, the dirty windows, and those glasses, you didn't see."

Yeah, hugely important. If I was a defense attorney, I would be batting that around all the time because light changes your perception of an image. So does motion and edges. And listen, if you don't put yourself in the shoes of that person at that time and at that place making that observation, you're doing yourself a disservice. So, survival vision, what you earlier talked about, tunnel vision, tunnel vision is a natural process to make you exclude things so you can fight that thing that's right in front of you and get away. And what have we learned? We've learned that under stress you'll go to tunnel vision.

Yeah, it's a good thing.

It's the same thing with your capillaries, it's the same thing with your breathing. But if you're not expecting it, Brian, guess what happens? Guess what happens? You're surprised by it, and now even though you're still on the X, even though you're still on the bubble, Brian, you're not thinking clearly. That's where training is the key component to survival.

Right. So, so to kind of bring this to, it's a different, you know, you see this affects a lot of what happens in, especially when it talks to when you get into different police situations or criminal behavior or even just eyewitness testimony. Or, "Hey, here's what I saw, you know, here's what happened." And it's, it's so bad, because we're, we're horrible at that stuff. We remember the things that we want to remember. Our brain will plant in stuff that didn't actually happen that maybe we heard later or saw later, and it finishes the story. It needs that. That's part of the, you know, kind of the explanatory storyline kind of thing, right? We have to have that, that, that it has to make sense to our brain. So, if it doesn't, it will fill in information so that it does make sense because it must fill that file folder.

Brian, if it doesn't fit a logical file flow, your brain can't categorize it.

Right. Well, yes. And that's why I'm saying, that's why some of these things that we talk about all the time, like confirmation bias and all the different biases that we have, like, it's actually made worse by it. It affects us greater just because of the limitations of our, of our eye and how we can actually see.

So, you know, the one case that, you know, we've talked about all the time in class or have before, and use as an example, is like the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City. He's a guy, poor immigrant, living in a rough neighborhood, it's all he can afford. He comes downstairs, it's night, he's smoking a cigarette on his porch. It's dark up there. He sees a vehicle coming in slowly with four guys in it and hoodies and stuff like that. And he's going, "Oh, man, I'm about to get robbed. They're going to steal everything I have. I don't have a bank account, so it's all in cash. So, they know that because I'm poor, and I'm going to get robbed." So, he's taken off running.

Well, meanwhile, the four people in the car were police officers, with this unit that then said, "Oh, hey, wait, doesn't that guy fit the description of someone we've been looking for?" They get out to contact him. He starts running. He thinks something's going on. They're young guns, they're coming out, start screaming. And then they all started shooting at him. During that process, one of the police officers falls. So, one of the other police officers thinks, "Oh my God, he's shot!" And then, so now he starts firing. Like, it's all this stuff that happens, and then it turns out like he was pulling his wallet out. There was nothing going on. It was, he was just completely innocent, nothing happened.

But what occurred and what people don't understand is those officers that went through that were going like, "Wait a minute!" And if you read the description of people on the scene of what the one police officer was doing, he was completely lost his mind because he's going, "No, I saw a gun! He had a gun! I saw it! Where is it?" He's digging through bushes, like, screaming, going, "What the hell? I know what I saw! I know what I saw!" And it was never there. And so, that's even just understanding the limitations of our eyesight is one of those things that affect these situations, and it's horrible, and someone died. And that, that's what I'm saying, is that these have real consequences.

No, no, you're, you're spot-on, Brian. And the reason I had to grab the second yellow pad here is you brought up a great point that I was taking a note on, doing some research yesterday. So, everybody at home, if you want to do some homework, write down the name Cara Levine, C-A-R-A L-E-V-I-N-E. And the project, the photography project, is "This Is Not A Gun." So, I'm looking up our good friend Philippe Varan with the Urban Air Mobility and Latin America thing for this morning's meeting that we got to do later. And all of a sudden, I see this Cara Levine, and I see these opaque photos, and what the point, I am not going to make her point, I'll let you make your own. But she had tables full of items that were all rendered, that these items got people killed because when they were holding in your hands or police reported they were a gun.

Well, let me disabuse you of something right now. You've heard in your life, and looking at the Constitution, and maybe going to be a witness in a court case or asked to be a juror, you've heard the term "jury of your peers." The reason that was such an important concept is people understood vision a long time ago. So, you talk about Amadou Diallo and what an incredible case, and poor Amadou and poor the cops, because what happened is nobody trained the cops that they were going to have confirmation bias, they were going to have dissonance, and they were going to see what they're going to see. So, if you took those cops, Brian, out of that situation and had a bunch of cops investigate them and then cops be in the jury, what would they find? I would find that those cops did the right thing at the right time because "tie goes to the runner." We were looking for criminality, and this guy was in a bad area, he was making further adjusters, we'd hear all that.

Now, wait, wait one second now. If we took Amadou, and if Amadou was still alive, and we took a bunch of people that lived in that block and that apartment complex that were up, what would they come out with? "Hey, damn, we thought we were getting robbed!" Do you understand? So, so we have to take the perspective of the person before we understand how these limitations and liabilities of our vision— do you get what I'm saying, Brian? We are—

Yeah, that's, that's, that's the, the, that's what makes this such a horrible tragedy and all of these situations that this occurs in, and why they, well, we can get into why they keep occurring later, but, or we always talk about it. But the idea is, you know, that this is humans are humans, and we are, we have prone to make mistakes far more than we're prone to make good choices, you know, sometimes, and all of that logic. So, are we more likely to be making a mistake accidentally, or are we doing it because we just hate that person? I don't know. That's what I'm saying, is that people want to layer in whatever the hell they want to layer on. They're going to take that and layer in their ideology and say, "Oh, look, it's this!" "Oh, look, it's that!" When, you know, if you put yourself in the situation, tragedies happen. They're horrible. And like these are what we talk about when we talk about proximate cause and contributing factors, right? And all the different contributing factors that occurred, and people want to get upset. "Well, that, it was horrible, they made a mistake! And now those people have to live with that the rest of their lives and that they, they killed an innocent person, and they didn't mean to. They thought one thing, and he thought another thing." And so, they were all going off of this faulty information. Yes, it comes down to just, I mean, literally our vision. Like, a lack of vision or lack of understanding of how your vision works can lead to these situations, kind of thing. And I know our response to these is always terrible, but I want to keep it to what our, our lane of what we're discussing about how vision and everything affects your behavior. And I'll let all the idiots on TV talk about all the reasons why these occur.

No, no, but let's do this. Let me ask you this, Brian, based on your knowledge of the case, based on your training and experience, and expert witness subject matter expert, all this other stuff, okay, how hard would it be for me to take a caper like we just discussed and turn it into something to light Philadelphia on fire? Let's say.

Oh, yeah. Well, or the other way, exactly.

Right, right. But this is what I'm getting at, is that you could do both. So, if you're wondering how bad this can spin out of control, I would say something like, "Four white cops in this car were out hunting tonight for a black man." Now, now listen, I don't want to get there, Brian, but yeah, if we started there, now what you're doing is you're starting to create this funnel of likelihood that I can't escape because what you've done is you've abandoned science. Okay? So, the idea is, yes, you guys, if we roll back the tape far enough, they had done this every night. And, and, you know what, they were in a neighborhood looking for criminality. They weren't hunting, you get what I'm trying to say, to, to kill somebody.

Well, remember, narrative is, is huge.

Well, that's, that's my point with everything, is that we're primed for, we need an explanatory storyline. So, these narratives come up, and that's, that's part of the issue. Is we don't want to look at them for, in, on the individual merits that they are, even though that's what our legal system and Constitution is based upon. But, but, you know, everyone wants a simple answer. And my point would be, if everyone involved in these situations, I mean, what's our standard? Our standard even when we're doing stuff with recently, and we won't go into detail, that's my legal warning to you about the government agency doing this. We're looking at, you know, different types of reconnaissance missions using different type of drones and bot stuff, and how do you determine someone's intent? And our whole thing was, you could put using this method and understanding human behavior, you should be able to put everyone as the same skin color, same color eyes, same color hair, and a pair of jeans, white T-shirt. Every single person in that scene should be wearing just that, looked just like that. And then the behavior, the insurgent behavior or criminal behavior, will be exposed simply due to their behavior and their intent, how they're acting, not due to any other factors. And like, we were like, that should be the standard. And that wasn't. And a lot of times these aren't. And if you, if you just replaced all of these situations with that, meaning, just say, "Hey, let's, let's say all things considered, everything was the same, everyone's wearing the same clothes, everyone's the same race, skin color, eye color, hair color, would this situation have occurred or how could we have prevented it from occurring?" And then that's, that's the point of this. It's like, yes, they, given the facts of this case, if I put in all these other factors you talk about, yeah, the same thing could have happened. So, so it's not about these other issues. It's about our behavior and how we process things. And specifically what today's topic is, is about our eye and our Functional Field of View, and how that ties into our orientation. And then that ties into our decision. And then it affects every single person around me because they see me doing that. And, you know, I mean, it's the same thing as when you walk into the bar and you see your buddy staring over at somewhere, what do you immediately do? You immediately look to where he's looking at and go, "What's going on over there?" And you have mirror neurons in your brain that go, "You're angry, now I'm angry, Greg. What's up? Is that guy over there talking?" And now this situation is escalating, and I just walked in the door. So, I think that starts with just how we take that in. But my big thing is, is too, Greg, is always, you know, "How do I get around that?" Meaning, what, what, what can I do about that? I mean, one, understanding that it affects me and how it affects me is huge. I think that's always, yeah, step one is the understanding human behavior and understanding how this stuff works. But what is it that I can do about it? I mean, or can I do anything?

Hey, you can do a ton about it, and it's very simple. So, one, get to the training. You know, that's going to be the answer. Do your training, do your research, do your study. Two, I'm never going to be able to put it as succinctly as what Brian just did, but that all started from a thing we did at Lee Field because I was getting sick and tired of them hiring culture-based role players and changing the scenario for every little village we're going through. Humans are humans all over the place. Stop that. You're wasting money.

But Brian, to answer specifically your question, the gift of time and distance. You can't save time. Time is being used up at the same rate all over. So, you're either cooking your turkey a few days before and putting it in the oven and wasting all that time that day and being free on Turkey Day, or you're cooking it just before Turkey Day. But it's the same amount of time. So, stop that. But when we talk about relativity, we're talking about the distance from the potential danger gives you time to invoke advanced critical thinking, or at least critical thinking. And what's the difference? Trained advanced critical thinking, untrained critical thinking. And then, unaware, no critical thinking equals death. So, you just wrote that. There's a book.

So, I'm watching an incident occur, and what's happening is I have to allow my five senses to take in as much information as possible to create a reasonable conclusion. So, because my eyes are used to the same thing over and over, and they don't like surprises, they don't like things to occur that aren't in my pattern, those become anomalous. So, when something becomes anomalous, now you orient to it and begin by putting cover between you and that object. Why? Because once in a while, and almost never, it'll be a danger. Do you get what I mean, Brian?

Yeah, I mean, before I pull into the lot and get closer and see what the yellow tape is for, I might want to stop out on the exit. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And pull out my binos and take a look. So, giving your vision the opportunity—

Brian, you know, Rods and Cones. You lay on your back, you're looking up at the stars, you go, "Look at the pretty star!" The person next to you stares at it, and it disappears. That's because your night vision can't forever see that. So, your Cones are the color vision, and your Rods are so spaced apart that they fall in between it. What does that have to do with what we're talking about? Now, if you understand that your vision can be fooled, you have to invoke your other senses, or you have to give your brain more time to come to grips with what you're seeing. If not, Brian, you're going to be in the trick back because you're going to be at ground zero making decisions, and your decisions then won't be anywhere near as good as they are if you give yourself the gift of time and distance.

And I, I think one of the things that I always hear is people say, "Oh, well, you got to, you got to take another person's perspective and, and walk a mile in their shoes." And we hear these again in kind of like a metaphorical sense. And I don't even— first of all, seeing, like, actually taking another human's perspective is very difficult to do psychologically. I mean, you, you—

Yes, it is. There is nothing—

Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying, is like, you, you can't just say you can, "Oh, let me take it from your point of view." Okay, that takes, that takes a lot to get there.

Yeah, that's not easy. We'd have none of the problems in our nation.

Right, right, exactly. But what I, I take that term as, just again, just like we're talking about the eye before we even get to different biases, like, is a very literal sense of taking another perspective. I mean, a very literal sense of walking 10 feet over there and looking at it again. I mean, I'm not joking. It's just, that's something that's that easy is, "Okay, I see what's going on here. Let me take a walk down there and take a look at it again from a different angle." So, I'm not talking about in some sense of philosophically or metaphorically or whatever analogy of taking another human being's perspective and trying to walk a mile in their shoes. I mean a very literal sense.

No, no, Brian, let me look at things. Let me street it up because, again, again, you hit a point that PhDs are teaching in courses right now, and people didn't understand it, and now they've had the epiphany. So, let me put it back to when we were running around chasing snipers in Iraq. Target of opportunity snipers, many times all it took was increased situational awareness to trump them. Then, when we taught people how to look, thermals trumped the rest of the guys. Then you had the snipers that were a lot better. What we had to do is we had to search the environment and find where they took a knee, the button from their shirt, their elbow imprint in the dirt. And then we would lay down in the prone position and see what they were seeing. Why? Because it gave us an insight into what their Fovea Centralis needed to create an ambush point. And then we extrapolated that and said each time this, and guess what? We— and I'm not going to do the math for you— but we reverse-engineered what that sniper was looking at. And, and Brian, we saved lives doing that. And then once we taught other people, guess what? That was the T3 (Train the Trainer). We didn't need to be there anymore. The soldiers, the sailors, the Marines were so good, they didn't need but a jump-start to say, "This is how to process your environment." What did they need? They needed us to dust off why Central Vision is so important to humans: light, motion, edges. If one of those goes away, and what does a sniper do, Brian? Do snipers bounce around a lot? No, they sit still in their environment, and they disappear, buddy.

That's, that's, I've used that. I was a chimney sweeper for many years. I've used that before in situations where someone was standing there watching me, like, "What are you doing?" Like, "I'm, I'm just not moving so that you can't see me anymore." And they're like, "You know, I see you standing right there!" And I'm like, "No, you don't!" But you don't. But, but, no, it. And, you know, there's, there's, there's a differences that can be explained that people write books about and talk about it, you know, especially when you talk about, you know, men and women and Functional Field of View. Yeah. So, and again, we just bring it back to, stop going down that path. Just take it from a very literal sense: women have a greater Functional Field of View than men. So, that's why they're also, you know, can literally see more and process more and are better at reading body language. You can pick up on things. These are, these are, I mean, physiological differences between men and women. I don't know if I can still say that, but there are. So, and that's what I mean, is that now we're on a watchlist. You can take it from a very literal—

No one's watching that list.

Take it from a very—

Well, our friends in North Macedonia are, and we love you! Big shout out to them. Thanks, they've been. And our friends in Japan, thank you very much.

Yeah, yeah. So, and actually our growing audience in Atlanta, shout out to you guys too! We've got a lot more down there. We love Atlanta! Whatever, baby. What I'm saying with that too, Greg, is like that goes into like, "Hey, what do you see over here?" You know, it's always, Michael is like, "Hey, when I'm, when I see something going on, then I'm like, 'Oh, I'm locked onto something.' I'll just be like, 'Hey, babe, what is that over there? What are those people doing?'" And she will literally come up with a different answer that will either walk me back from where I'm going with it or add evidence to where I'm going with it, you know? And it's, it's such a different way of looking at it, and we go, "Oh, yeah, we have different perspectives." But we're saying it in a very literal sense. So, so stick with that and use that and understand it, is what I'm saying, is that it, that's a good thing for one. And I mean, it's logical, you're testing a hypothesis, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, go, go ahead.

No, no stranger to Depends, the undergarments, and doing a shout-out for them right now. Thank you, everybody. We are sponsored. This segment of the show is brought to you by—

Exactly. Depends it should be.

And my Depends are Garanimals, so I just matched the draft with the giraffe or the monkey with the monkey, so I know what I'm wearing. But the idea— no, no pun intended, folks. So, thank you for my bio brick, I just took it.

But listen, the biggest argument I ever got into with a group of people that I had to walk away because they just weren't getting it, is, "What do you see?" And they would say, "It depends." "Oh, yeah, well, what do you see here?" "If you're using context relevance, it depends." No, stop sniping, stop closing your brain, stop fomenting this hate, and just look at what you're looking at. Because humans, and look, if you think I'm going to say there isn't racism or there isn't sexism there, you're out of your tree because there is. There is. But it's not lurking in every corner of every conversation and everything that we do or say, that's all I'm saying. So, if we're talking about your survival vision, and you've never been to the point where your oxygen-starved because you're gasping in the air because you've just been surprised by something, and now the entire world turns into that tunnel, you know, The Time Tunnel, the old TV show, and it's spinning around at your head, then you're going to be totally hosed. So, how do you do that? One, you have to do part task and practical application training, even if you're doing it with your kids or at home. So, for example, even if you're walking with your kids or your dog and you hear a car backfire, move to a position of cover and take a knee. Why? Because one day that'll save your life.

Yeah, well, do you understand what I'm trying to say?

So, so all I'm saying, Brian, is rehearsal for an event— and we go into that on future pods and past pods and lessons learned— but rehearsal for the event training is the same.

So, so in defense of the "it depends" response, I've been known to use that when we're in those rooms where it's a whole bunch of PhD people who are so much smarter and more experienced than me, and it comes to me with a very serious question about some abstract, nebulous topic, and, "Well, it depends." And if you hear me start with that, it's because you know that that's a brush I probably don't know. I probably, I'm probably unqualified to answer the question, and I'm trying to pass it along. Folks, we have to deal with some of the smartest, literally the smartest human beings on the face of the planet.

Yeah. And they'll come up and they'll say, "Well, in this religion, they have a head covering." Well, I don't know a religion that doesn't have a head covering that's wearing a head. Inhabit this. And then they say, "Well, here, it's all about the language, the different language." Yeah, dude, if I'm going to shoot you at a thousand meters, I can't even hear what you're saying! And then they do this and that. You know what it's about? It's about orientation. If I orient towards something, it's important to me. If I take a knee and move behind cover, something's about to happen. Always go with the simplest answer. Why, Brian? Because a complex, convoluted storyline is going to take you down rabbit holes you don't need to be [in]. Survival is a game of inches. It's in the moment. It's nanoseconds. Slow that time down and think clearly.

Well, that, that's, that's why we always bring it back to the, the why we covered the Functional Field of View and understanding it, and that strong Central Vision is because it's so important to everything. We're just looking at someone and knowing what's important to them. Now, 90% of the time, you look at someone, they're staring at their phone right now. But anything other, which is good, because then you can pick out it. Well, it's easy to identify who's not. You know what I mean? Like, "What are you, where's your bad guy?" Right there, exactly. You know, so there's, there's someone who's up to no good or doesn't own a phone for some, you know what I mean? So, like, we're sucked into those things. But it's important to understand when you couple that what we call that Functional Field of View that we talked about with your orientation. I mean, that's a very simple way to know, "I'm looking across at 100 meters away, and I know what is most important to Greg right now in his life because he's looking at it, and his, and his body is completely oriented to it."

And it'll likely be a Winchell's donut. Yeah.

No, so Brian, again with the egg thing. Put the egg back in the fridge, by the way, or eat it.

A real simple thing at home, when you're teaching your kids or you're trying to teach your spouse or your loved ones, grab a funnel. Everybody's got a funnel somewhere around their house or in their garage for their fuel. There's a big end of the funnel. The big end of the funnel is the way your field of view and your field of vision is designed in your head, and that's peripheral. So, as it comes closer to the little hole, that little hole is how you see the world. So, look at it this way one time and understand that your brain is making all of its decisions, Brian, based on a little bitty hole at the end. And we could go into so many different analogies from that. The first fire fight, you're looking at your front sight post, you know what I'm trying to say. But so the idea is, vision is hugely important. It goes from big to small, and you're not seeing what you think you are. "Do you see what I see?" You know.

Yeah, no, and the funnel analogy is perfect because, I mean, like you just said, you're looking through one end, and, "Oh, look at the big open view!" But you have to turn it around and look at the other way.

Got to be. And your world. The funnel I have is attached to a hose that goes to my mouth. It's on your hat.

Yeah, it's a spearhead.

So, remember when we were— do you remember when we were in Afghanistan with Collier, and the funnel analogy came up where Collier was going, "Holy crap, look how far away those guys are!" And we flipped his binos over because they're right on top of us. You remember? So, that's for you, Eric, just to see, listen to the podcast, you back.

Well, that was the same guy with the guy with a thermal going, "Man, this thing isn't working!" And I just grabbed it, "Yep, turn it around and go, 'Why don't you try looking through this end?'"

But the one guy in the range, the super secret squirrel, and we're doing the night ops, and he goes, "These gosh darn thermals never work!" And Shelly grabbed the back of his head and pushed it up so the eyepiece opened, and he goes, "Damn, that's beautiful!" You know, folks, listen, most mistakes are on us. I make them every day. But the idea is, if you don't learn from that scar tissue, if you don't learn from everybody in the room pointing and laughing at you, or you don't learn from throwing away that Depends, you're going to be a victim of it next time that stuff comes around.

Yeah. So, so big one on this. Functional Field of View is extremely important. It's smaller than you think. You take in less than you think. Women can see almost twice as much as men. I'm sorry, but that's why they're better, one of the reasons why they're generally better at reading body language. Amen. There's, there's a lot behind that. We could even do a whole podcast on that, on, on, on why. But I think it's a good point. And the other thing is about perspective, and we mean perspective from a very, very literal sense. Exactly. "I'm taking four steps to your right and looking at it again." It will literally change your world because you'll see it differently. And so, before anyone goes down the rabbit hole of all these other different ideologies or narratives that they want to put on different situations or what they're doing, or jumping to, we call it literally just jumping to unreasonable conclusions. I mean, you can't, you can't make a definitive answer if you don't even understand how your eye is processing your environment. How can you even say some of the things you do? So, we always just keep that in mind. And then always remember, like, you can kind of changing perspective, looking around, not getting focus-locked, is one of those ways to help with the situation. But it's always going to be there. Just, just like, you know, anything else that we talk about. You have to cope with it. You have to learn to cope with it. It's like gravity. It's never not going to be there.

Yeah, I can come, come on up to the top of this building. I'll show you otherwise. I got you.

No, I mean, it's enough. Everything, everything physically, the physics of life. Changing it hurts less. Everything hurts less with enough changes. So, so I think that's a good point just to, yeah, I know we wanted to hit up, we got a number of different areas today. But with the eye and how it works and how we process stuff, because it's just, we have to understand our limitations. Because I look at these especially terms people throw around, like "blind spots" or "perspective," and I'm like, "You, if you don't even understand that at a literal sense, how could you then extrapolate that over into whatever narrative you're saying?" So, if your foundation is weak, everything you build on it is going to be subsequently, it's not going to go well. All right, well then. Oh, Debbie, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for the comments. She's been a big fan. She was just following along and hopped out on Facebook. So again, to everyone listening, I'll put the link in the episode details, and you can follow me along when we do pop up live and ask questions and interact. Also, we're going to be adding more to the Patreon site. If you're not on there, we're going to have exclusive stuff for them. And if those members of the Patreon that are on there, we thank you guys. And I already reached out to everyone saying, "We've got some stuff coming up in the works that you guys will have, you guys and girls will have access to before anyone else does, and not have to pay for it." So, that's cool. So, so there, there you go. We appreciate you following us along on there. Anything else to add, Greg?

Telephone, Telegraph, Tele-Marren. If you've got a question, make sure you reach out to us. There's a bunch of ways to do that, or feel free to show up randomly in person at Marren's house.

That won't go well for anyone involved. Probably for you, pal. Yeah. So, that, that's, I don't, I don't suggest doing that. But Greg in Gunnison is more than welcome to host you. Good luck getting around Gunnison unnoticed.

Thanks, guys. You're going to pull in, you're going to pull up, "Okay, listen, I've noticed every day in Gunnison, people are yelling, 'Look, it's Orson Welles!' I got it, thanks so much, you're crushing me!"

I think on, on that note, again, like Eric said, lefty_greg@gmail is the best way to get a hold of us if you want us to cover anything else. But please feel free to reach out with us with comments, concerns, questions. Feedback is always excellent. Money, donations. All right. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Don't forget that training changes behavior.