The perception of life:

When an event occurs in life what causes it? Why is it that specific event, when there are thousands of other possibilities?

Think of how your life could have been if one decision had been slightly different.
Our decisions are based and greatly affected by our perception of the world around us.
We like to think of this as the Perception Theory, because the way people perceive things to be can be altered at any time and these altered perceptions also alter our behaviour and thus the cause of events. Other people’s perceptions of you are also volatile and affected by how you behave, thus our perceptions of others and the world are linked to the perception of ourselves. It is this theory that forms the building blocks of the social structure we have in today’s society. Therefore the structure of societies and events which occur within them are subject to tiny subtle variations in individual and group perceptions, like a network. They are truly chaotic.

A prime example of this came following the 9/11 tragedy, when a minority of New Yorkers and Americans across the country began to perpetrate hate crimes against Sikhs. This was only down to the fact that they believed them to be Muslim (as they wore turbans), and blamed them personally for the deaths that occurred that day, despite the fact that they had no links to the terrorists. Had they not perceived them to be threats, more than one Sikh would still be alive today.
Perception affects everything in the world, from prejudice to experience based perception. It is perception that is a key factor in all major world events. Barack Obama would not have been elected as President of the United States if more than half of America’s population hadn’t perceived him to be a better candidate than McCain or the public view of black segregation had stayed as it was.
At significant points in time, individuals have stood up for the rights of black people; Martin Luther King is a good example. His work led the population to gradually change their perception of ethnic minorities, and so they began to be considered equal, and they have been for a long time now.
In day to day life perception changes every second and with every action that a human does. For example, a pupil that regularly gets into trouble receives praise for exhibiting behaviour that we consider to be normal therefore a student that is normally well mannered, the slightest mistake or behavioural defect earns him far heavier punishments than the student that is regularly in trouble. This one slip up can change the teacher’s perception of the normally well mannered student and associate him with other bad mannered students. It’s biased and in our society you need people to see the flaws in our social network.

In this article we have breached upon Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory is the study of chaotic behaviour in certain systems. For example, our social network can be truly chaotic due to incredibly subtle variations that can lead to larger changes. An innovator of this theory was the meteorologist Edward Lorenz who, in1991, who whilst studying weather patterns, used a computer to show the sequences of his observations. Purely by coincidence he decided to go back to the middle of a sequence and view it from that point. He typed in the point that he would view the sequence from which was supposed to be “.506127”. Lorenz missed off a significant part of the value “.000127” and then left the sequence to play. When he came back to this sequence he found that it had evolved dramatically and was not what he predicted. The “.000127” is scientifically accepted to be nothing and so suggests that the sequence should not have been affected so drastically. This incredible discovery showed how an incredibly subtle variation can have a dramatic effect.
This lead to Lorenz writing a paper titled “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Lorenz is obviously referring to the fact that the number “.000127” is so insignificant that it represents that of a butterfly’s wings flapping. Taking this back to perception theory, it shows how any action, no matter how big or small, conscious or unconscious, can change the world.