to see differently, change the way you look

A photographer friend gave me a composition trick that is kinda brilliant and has applications well outside the field of photography.

We tend to filter out most everything we see, hear, smell, etc., because our minds would explode if we had to process more than a minute fraction of every sense impression that comes in. But if we can change the way we perceive things, even a little bit, the world takes on a fresh appearance. We see things we never saw before — even though they were there all along.

So here’s the trick: Look from right to left.

We are trained from Kindergarten to read from left to right, and our minds have adapted by creating expectations about what it will see during a left-to-right scan. Reverse the scan however and your mental autopilot crashes, leaving you free to see things anew.

Try it. It works!