Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

YOU AND POINT OF VIEW.

I've written here and here about the seemingly very human inability to empathize, to put oneself in another's shoes and see or experience the world from his or her point of view. We seem to easily forget the world in our own heads is not the world as others see it.

I had a little dopey -- but real-world -- epiphany about this earlier today. Dopey because it's the kind of thing we all intuitively know but don't realize, or just forget. I prepared to take a photo of my face with my iPhone -- I made sure the lighting was okay, I sat up straight, tried not to scowl and, it seemed to me I looked fairly decent on the screen, at least to my overly self-critical eyes. So I clicked. But when I called up the photo I just took from the phone's photo album I looked terrible, completely different.

How could this be? I'd just seen myself on-screen and I looked fine. But after taking the picture, I looked different. Had the act of pressing a button changed how I looked? Impossible. Was I imagining things? Not exactly.

Then it hit me. If you have in iPhone, try this right now. Turn on the camera and look at yourself, in other words the live image of you on the screen. You'll notice that it's a mirror image of yourself. In fact, it's exactly how you look in the mirror. Now take a photo of yourself and pull it up. It's no longer the same mirror image from a moment ago; it's a photo of you from the iPhone's perspective, from another person's perspective.

In other words, the first image you saw (or me screencapped on the left above) was you the way you're used to seeing yourself anytime you look in the mirror. The photographed image of you (the image of me on the right) is not the same image, it's how you look to other people. This seeming no brainer jarringly revealed to me why I hate photos of myself -- in my world, most of the time, I see a reflection of myself, and when I'm not focused on the bags under my eyes or the wrinkles, I like that me. The photo version of me is not the me I'm used to seeing, but perhaps more unsettling, I realize it is how others see me. Every day.

Another good example of this are voice recordings. We all hate when we hear our voices played back but, like it or not, that's actually a more faithful representation of how we really sound to others. How we sound to ourselves when we're speaking is probably distorted by the fact our ears are picking up the sound of our voices from outside and inside our heads.

All this to say, unless you sometimes make a point of actively stepping out of your point of view, your frame of reference, and into someone else's, you may really never quite appreciate how things truly are. It can be a humbling experience.

HOPE: 140 WORDS ABOUT A BOTTLE IN THE GAZA SEA

Back in October, I wrote a blog post asking the question "Why are Jews making Palestinian movies?" There's a new one -- well, not so much a Palestinian movie as one about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of an unlikely couple.

Naim is a Palestinian who finds a message in a bottle, washed up on a Gazan beach. The note trapped inside is written by an Israeli teenager named Tal. They become online penpals and, despite justified mistrust and fear on both sides, learn to respect and even love each other.

Granted A Bottle in the Gaza Sea is far-fetched but then so are stories about flying men in tights or light sabers in galaxies far far away. In the end, your response and acceptance of this story may rest on your level of cynicism about the most intractable divorce in the history of the world.

I still cling to hope, not only that this damn conflict will end peacefully one day, but also that enough Israelis and Palestinians will get to see this film and begin the slow process of changing the way they think and feel about each other.

THE HUMAN ANIMAL: 140 WORDS ON CHIMPANZEE

Are humans animals? Did we evolve? Surprisingly, 150 years after Charles Darwin first published On The Origin of Species, those questions keep coming up. They shouldn't -- not because debate shouldn't be encouraged nor because science isn't sometimes wrong, but because the train has truly left the station on this issue. No matter which 1500-, 2000- or 3000-year-old book written by bedouins you believe, the facts are that the theory (and by theory I mean fact) of evolution permeates nearly every aspect of our lives -- from flu vaccines to drug resistance to growing crops to lab testing on animals.

We are animals. We may be smarter (sometimes) than most if not all of them, we may use sophisticated language and tools, but we're still of them. If all the biological and genetic evidence doesn't sway you, then simply use your lying eyes. Sit in a quiet movie theatre and watch Chimpanzee and see what Adam and Eve really looked like.

ARE YOU INVESTED?

Maybe it's human nature, but it seems we all have a tendency to get really defensive when someone challenges our long-held beliefs, even when we're presented with substantial evidence to counter those beliefs.

I could talk about religion here, and it's certainly relevant, but there are lots more mundane examples too.

Take Blackberry versus iPhone. When the iPhone was introduced, many BlackBerry users defensively scoffed: "you can't type on that thing" or "it's not secure."  Anyone who's spent any time with an iPhone eventually admits typing on virtual keys is different but not all that more difficult when you get the hang of it, and security issues have largely been resolved. Which mostly leaves BlackBerry believers with the sort of nebulous claim that "you can't beat it for business." But you only have to see the share prices of RIM and Apple to get a sense of which way the market has gone for their respective products. Nevertheless a core segment of die-hard BlackBerryists refuse to give in.

They're invested.

Take another example. The US is still the dominant economic and military superpower in the world. But it seems clear that its politics and economics are increasingly sclerotic and its power is waning. Might it turn itself around? Maybe. But there's little doubt China and India are catching up. Still, ask average Americans, even those you wouldn't expect to be typically jingoistic, and remind them that history is replete with examples of once great powers that were swept away by new ones and they become very defensive. America is different, they'll tell you. Or they'll pull out a handful of reasons why China will never replace the US.

To many of us living outside the bubble of American exceptionalism, we see where the US is headed. But to most Americans, they simply can't or won't. They're invested.

It's hard sometimes to remove oneself from beliefs and ways of thinking we've always assumed were true. People were invested in a flat earth even decades after the preponderance of evidence clearly showed otherwise. Some are still invested in creation myths even though the evidence for evolution and natural selection is indisputable.

It may be human nature to believe what we're comfortable believing. But at some point reason and facts must overtake belief and wishful thinking. Otherwise we end up making our opinions appear, at best, silly, or at worst, simply irrelevant.