perceptual barriers

Perceptual barriers are the hardest to explain and the most common barrier in my opinion. It spans so many things in our brains. It can keep us from seeing things because of how we live our lives, where we work, what we know and what state of mind we are in. I have picked up a lot of cross word puzzles in my day, but i never finish in one sit down. When I get stumped I walk away and come back to find I am better than before. These perceptual barriers have been studied on a pretty deep level. Malcom Gladwell wrote a book about it. In one of the chapters he talks about a study that was done on how certain words can change our perception of people. Two groups of students were each told to look at a different set of words before they were sent into a frustrating situation. The first group of students were shown a list of words like; happy, creative, fun loving, sunshine, motivation, ect. This group responded mildly and with forgiveness to the frustrating setting. The second group was shown a list like; anger, racism, political bias, jerks, crappy, and so on. this group responded to the frustrating situation by yelling, getting angry, calling people names and storming out. the words were enough to alter the perception of the two groups. Just goes to show that we need to leave our baggage at the door if we want to see everything possible in new situations.