In response to blogotomy’s post on Perception:

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
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No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.
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How many other things are we missing?

I just saw Joshua Bell a few weeks ago at the Copley Symphony Hall, i.e, a setting where people were fully primed to appreciate his genius (the cost of the ticket, the stage, the lights, the audience turned by their seats to focus fully on him). He received many standing ovations.

We miss a lot of beauty because we’re constantly in a hurry and too focused on tasks to be done and destinations to be reached.

But I also think it has to do with what kind of beauty we’re more naturally attuned too or more able to appreciate. I tend to stop to watch and listen whenever someone is playing percussion or a stringed instrument because those sounds resonate with me most.

I had an engineering professor who showed our class this music video done by a large group of students to I Got A Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. What did he tell us to pay attention to?

The beauty of motion.

He wanted us to watch the talent of the camera person in shooting this entire 5-minute, constantly moving video, in one single shot. I would have never seen this on my own. But he was so captivated by “the beauty of motion” not just in this video, but throughout the entire dynamics class that it made me want to see dynamics in the light of beauty rather than just in boring formulas. It made me want to stay in the class even when I realized it wasn’t quite the direction I wanted to go in.

So it’s not just tuning ourselves to be see beauty on our own terms, even though we frequently lack this. It’s also being receptive to what other people find beautiful and learning to expand ourselves by seeing through their eyes.