Day 31: Re-cognition

Today a brief talk about the word: recognition.

Cognition is a word that describes our how our thoughts, memories, assumptions, paradigms, and sensory organs work together to help us know reality.

Cognitive therapy is a way of looking closely at all those factors and how they produce an emotional reaction and a response of action to what we perceive as reality in a particular moment.

Here's an example. If a receptionist is short and unfriendly to me at a library or a school or a business, my cognitive process usually goes this way: She doesn't like me, I did something wrong, I am bothering her. So I get sad and feel ashamed. Sometimes I get sulky and cry or leave before I do what I came to do. That shows I need some significant skills to learn re-cognition of a situation to which most emotionally healthy people can see reality as: that receptionist is having a bad day or she doesn't feel happy today and it has very little to do at all with me.

I also find it helpful to think of an optical illusion when I think about the concept of recognition. Most of us have an initial cognition of an optical illusion, like the classic one that sees a vase or a candlestick made from to squiggly vertical lines. And then someone says to us: do you see the two faces looking at each other? Re-cognition. The lines don't change, but the cognition is regrouped and the sensory messages are re-processed in the brain. Then we look at it for a while and toggle back and forth to see the first reality and the second reality, and we feel a magic that both realities can be seen in the same drawing.

Recognizing a person is sort of like that. We see a face, but the identity is not hitting our brain. It is someone we knew before, or someone we are supposed to know, but while we are seeing every detail in the face, something else that we are seeing or thinking or assuming or interpreting is blocking the recognition. It is a weird feeling to go from seeing to recognition, because it seems weird that nothing about what we are seeing has changed, but something else less obvious comes in to play that gives us the ability to recognize. Sometimes it is the memory recall of a past event or the sound of the other person's voice, or sometimes they have to go all the way and say their name and remind us in detail who they are and why we know them.

I have talked before about the two ways that recognition can be delayed. One is that the person who sees but does not recognize is operating with assumptions and paradigms of cognition that keep recognition from taking place. In The Prince and the Pauper, no one recognized the prince when he was in pauper's clothes, because everyone knew for a fact that a prince would never wear raggedy clothes.

THe other way is usually because the unrecognized person wants to remain unrecognized for a time, so he or she is in disguise or veil or cloak until she/he is ready to be recognized. No one recognized the Prince because he had altered his appearance and placed himself in an unlikely social setting.

Sometime the two ways are both happening at the same time. Usually they are, I guess, and time is moving both blindness and disguise along to that climax scene when the blinders are lifted and disguises are removed, and that weird disorienting and reorienting apocalyptic experience of recognition takes hold upon an individual or crowd.