Specialists Versus The Big Picture

When looking too closely means you are missing reality...

Whenever I listen to someone speaking about psychopathy I cannot help but notice serious limitations in their understanding. Granted, a lot of my understanding comes from living with a psychopathic brain, but a lot of my knowledge comes from reading different perspectives that are presented regarding psychopathy. I am not simply reading psychological papers about psychopathy, but neuroscience as well.

Those two areas of study have a lot to do with one another, but it seems very frequently they don’t seem to share information across the aisle. Because of this, there are many times when two areas of study create a picture, but that picture isn’t seen by either side. Instead of taking in all the knowledge possible, they are too stuck in their own specialty, and miss the forest for the trees.

Psychopathy is not remotely the only place this occurs. It is a common problem that spans many different areas of information. When someone has their eyes so focused on something that is very very specific, they are apt to not see what is going on around them.

A long time ago, I was playing Resident Evil 4. Weird segue… right? It is what it is, deal with it and let’s move on. So I was playing this game, and it was a new system for me to learn in gaming. It utilized systems that I was unaccustomed to, and there was, as there always is, a learning curve. My Significant Other, however, was and is very skilled at first person shooters and the game mechanics were old hat to him. I was at a part of the game that looks like this:

When you arrive at that spot you can see this area from behind a wall with a gate. Also, it is right after you meet this guy:

Who oh so very helpfully sells you this:

The area that I was in is sniper’s paradise. There are enemies scattered all across the map just waiting to be picked off. Now, in Resident Evil 4, there are two rifles. One is the beginner’s rifle, and is not the one pictured above. The difference between the two is that the beginner’s rifle makes you come out of the scope sights after every single shot. This annoyed me, so when I got the handy dandy upgrade that didn’t make me come out of the scope sights, I was a happy girl. Until…

Until…

They would just show up out of nowhere and let me tell you, they were very murdery. I mean, yeah, I was murdering them first, but that’s like my whole thing as the main character of the game. I get to do the killing, and they get to fall by the wayside after my sniper rifle makes short work of them. That’s the deal… right?

My Significant Other watched me do this part a couple of times, and held his tongue. If you know me, you know I am stubborn, and doing things how I am going to do them is not really negotiable until I have met my limit of patience, and that can take a while. Just like your patience is reaching an end wondering what the hell this part of this post has to do with the beginning of it. Hang on a second… I’m getting there.

Anyway, he sees that I am finally at my saturation point and understood that my method was not going to be successful. Apparently, no matter how fast I shoot them all, there are more that I can’t sight, and those are the ones that are nabbing me while I go all murder ball on their monster buddies. They were not interested in my plans whatsoever. They had a meeting and decided that there was going to be hell to pay for the girl that was wearing Leon as a skinsuit, and got me before I got them. Very annoying.

“You have to drop the sights every once in a while,” came the patient even voice of my SO while I stare with annoyance at this screen yet again:

“I know I’m dead RE4. You don’t have to be a d*ck about it… What?”

“You need to come out of the rifle sights after every couple of shots. You’re so focused on sniping that you’re missing them coming through the gate and using farming implements to dismember Leon. You have to drop the sights.”

But, I don’t wanna drop the sights. I want to play it like this even though it’s not really working at the moment. He’s probably right though. He usually is. Fine, I will drop the stupid sights.

Lo and behold, what happened? Well, I still died a few times. Just because I dropped them for a second and took out the first crew that came to make trouble, and just because he was right, of course, I figured that once I dealt with them, I could go back to playing my way. Stubborn, remember?

After a while, I finally adapted my play style, and found that my way was too limiting. He was right, and I had to look at the larger picture. Just because I didn’t want to do it, just because I was focused on what I was focused on, didn’t make the mercenaries any less apt to hit me with axes and scythes and make me get the red screen of, you f*cked up again. My not being interested in their presence did not change the larger picture which included them and their annoyingly accurate aim. That larger picture is what had the information that I needed to progress, and ignoring it had me sitting in the same Sisyphean valley doing the same Sisyphean things.

This is what humanity does. They are sighted in, and they do not even consider that the picture is much larger than the tiny microcosm that they are staring at. In many cases, if you even suggest that this might be the case, they will be gravely offended that you may suggest that they do not know everything that there is to know about a given situation. This is especially true in things like science and specialties.

Don’t get me wrong, specialties are amazing. If you don’t know how amazing they are, try to make a microwave on your own, then come back to me and tell me how well you did. And I don’t mean buy all the parts and assemble it, I mean source the metal, fabricate the wiring, do all of it, from scratch, then let me know how it turned out. Spoiler, there is a guy that decided to make a toaster, you know that thing on your counter that if it breaks will cost you twenty dollars to replace, and he figured out that it was literally impossible. The only reason that toaster, that microwave, that big screen TV exists, is because of specialties. The same can be said for medical advancements.

Specialties and specialists are awesome, but they can be too scoped into what they think the whole picture is, and they miss things that would be the key to taking the next step in their field. Another issue is that some specialists will shut out anyone that they don’t think of as on their level. I will discuss this more in another post, but there is an excellent example of this in an interview with James Fallon.

For those of you that do not know, James Fallon is a neuroscientist that found out by chance that he has a psychopathic brain. Or rather, he has a borderline psychopathic brain. In the course of his research, he discovered that his brain was very similar to those that he had studied the scans of that were psychopathic criminals. He was very surprised, and this led him on a journey of self-discovery. It’s a very interesting journey, and I recommend learning about it to anyone interested.

During this time, he wrote a book, The Psychopath Inside, and after writing his book he did a number of interviews. On one of these interviews, the interviewer has on a psychologist that has never examined Fallon, hasn’t any relationship to him, hasn’t even read his book, but immediately dismisses Fallon entirely. He isn’t a psychopath because he doesn’t fit the mold of a criminal, therefore Fallon is either wrong, or he’s lying.

That is a person that won’t drop the scope. They aren’t interested in hearing that there might be more to their area of study than they had considered, and that this person, an accomplished neuroscientist that has studied psychopathic brains, might know what he’s talking about. He’s not a criminal, therefore he’s not a psychopath.

Thinking of this sort is not helping the world. The ability to look beyond the immediate and see a larger picture is one that we have to learn, and not only do we have to learn it, it is something that we will be continually reminded of throughout our lives. No matter how many times you overcome the instinct to respond to the smaller picture, there are many more times that the larger picture eludes us because it is full of information that we simply do not have.

We will all come to the understanding again and again that we are seeing a fraction of reality. No more. We can keep expanding that fraction to include a tiny bit more in every situation that we might encounter, but the fact is that it will always be a very small portion of a very complex picture. It is important to remember that whenever we are so certain of something that we don’t want to listen to anyone else who might have a different understanding. Their understanding might give another tiny bit, but we have to be willing to at least entertain that we may lack crucial information that could reshape our world.

Drop the sights. Take more in.