Sense Calibration

Doug Treadwell

Several months ago, while listening to a lecture in Physics about the accuracy and precision of measuring instruments and how to determine these properties, I happened upon the realization that we put very little effort into calibrating our senses. It may be helpful to state the definition of calibration, which is given in Wikipedia as "the process of establishing the relationship between a measuring device and the units of measure." It occurred to me that putting more effort into such calibration could be beneficial. I will try to explain why, and how we can do it.

If you've ever watched a TV show involving crime and law enforcement, you'll be familiar with the scene where the victim of a crime is asked by the police officer for a description of the criminal. In most cases all they can say is that the criminal was "tall, white, middle-aged, and with dark hair." Usually they can say more about what the criminal was wearing, which is easy to change, than about the criminal's physical characteristics. How much more helpful would it be if the average person were able to describe a criminal in extreme detail, such as: height within an inch; skin and hair color within a few shades; face, nose, eye, and chin shape; and so on.

Of course, our improved calibration would not only be useful for law enforcement purposes. It would also be useful for simply describing friends. If you were describing your friend Joe to your other friend Sally who was going to meet him at Starbucks, you could say much more than "he's tall and has dark hair". You could define him specifically enough that there would probably only be one person in Starbucks that matched his description.

The average person today probably can't describe hair in more than half a dozen colors with any accuracy, or skin color except for white, brown, and black and the "light" and "dark" of each, or height within better than half a foot. Most people probably don't even know the words for the shapes of faces, noses, or eyes, or for hair cuts other than the most common. We are certainly capable of doing better than that, but we just don't try.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there is no standard vocabulary for these things. Therefore, I suggest we create such a standard and teach it in school so it is familiar to everyone. A whole new depth of description will be open to us if we do. Imagine only being able to describe the world with the colors red, green, and blue, and then introducing our current vocabulary of colors. The difference would be enormous. What would we gain in terms of verbal and written expression, imagination, and memory? Having more specific vocabulary would probably allow for more precise thinking and remembering.

This is only one example of sense calibration, and then only one example within the sense of sight. In addition to improving our ability to describe people, we could improve our ability to describe things, and to visually estimate dimensions and distances. If I were to put a random object on a desk about ten feet away from someone and asked them how wide it is, they would probably be inaccurate by thirty to fifty percent. If I removed that object and put another object of roughly the same size on the table five minutes later, they would probably also be imprecise by a significant proportion. That is, even if the objects were the same width, they probably wouldn't give the same width for both.

If I were to ask how long a car is, the average person would probably be inaccurate by several feet. If I were to ask how far away a car is in a parking lot, they would probably be inaccurate by tens of feet for a car only a hundred feet away. Again, we are certainly capable of doing better than that, but we just don't try to develop that ability. By simply learning the dimensions of common objects, we should be able to visually measure their distances and the dimensions of other objects near them with much better accuracy. If we could identify distances more accurately, would we then be able to throw a ball more accurately?

What I suggest is that we at least try to improve our abilities such as these, and in general try to calibrate our senses. If it proves to be too difficult to improve beyond a certain point, then we can stop at that point, but at the moment we don't try at all and don't know how much easy improvement we're ignoring. Currently our ability to describe the world with our senses is mostly qualitative. What if we were to make it quantitative as well? How might that change how we perceive our world, and what consequences might that change have?

January 15, 2010