Reality and Perception

My mind is a jumble of thoughts now. Maybe totally disorganised, but well I'll try to write them out in as much an organised way as possible. I was just thinking about the way people tend to perceive what they see and observe. And how much reality is different from perception.

Reality, as defined in wikipedia (one of the few knowledge bases I trust ;) ), refers to the state of things as they actually exist. Perception is defined to be the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting and organizing sensory information. Generally, we acquire the facts from the reality, interpret them according to our beliefs, select whatever is in conjunction with our thoughts and organise that as the reality. In this process, the actual reality may be interpreted in a completely wrong way.

People tend to love their perception of things than the actual reality. It is the natural tendency of the human mind, I guess, to imagine that things exist as it intends them to be. Anything out of the ordinary, and the mind tends to question that, and if not able to explain that or to accept that, the mind just tends to ignore the event. Weird, but true. People generally tend to ignore or deny some facts, since they do not want to believe that there is a problem, or they have just accepted that there is no solution to the problem. Well, as they say, ignorance is bliss ;) and with knowledge comes responsibility. It is much easier to live in ignorance than with knowledge of the actual reality and a wrong perception.

I am not a student of psychology, but I am very interested in some nuances of the subject. Some people may argue that psychology is not even a science, a pseudo-science maybe! But well, I certainly believe that psychology is a science, something that needs to be understood in depth. Human mind is one of the most complex concepts in this universe and trying to understand why one behaves in a particular way under a particular circumstance is one of the toughest things to do. This needs in-depth understanding and studying of the behavior of people. This may include psycho-analysis, physiology of the human body and many such related areas. Hence I have a strong belief that psychology is one of the most important and complex aspects of modern science. But even to this day, people are not ready to accept psychology as something important, an indispensable part of the every-day life... I do not know how long it is going to take for people to actual sit up, accept reality (not their perception... lol) and move on in life! Not in this lifetime, I guess... :)

Lol.. I tried to organise the thoughts as much as I could... though I cannot see much of a flow in this blog... well, as I said the human mind is complex... it thinks of all weird things in a weird sort of way! ;)