We deem things around us as pigeons to be put in pigeonholes already created in our mind. Pigeonholing is when we see something and, rather than taking every single nuance and fact about that phenomena, event or person into consideration and making a judgement, we just take a few points and file them away into our premade notion of their “group”. We draw a rough sketch and fill in the blanks by readymade conceptions. This aviary mind trick is not just prejudice or bias, well it is to a point, but it is necessary to be able to do anything. We need to put some boundaries on the unbounded in order to be able to grasp it and work with the notions. It’s a way of simplifying our surroundings. If you were to remember every single nuance of every single thing you’ve encountered you would most surely go bonkers.

So we think in categories and patterns and some form of bias is just inbuilt into our biology. Mechanisms for dividing and categorizing the world are there to stay, because they work. Categorization is not without its problems and issues. Language and culture we’ve been brought up in determine what we see, how we see it, how we categorize and remember, how we speak and think. Some cultures may not have a name for something your culture or language does and they simply don’t perceive that thing the same way or at all. The clearer cut the category for a thing the more likely we are to notice it, remember and recreate it. When we bound things into a category we also tend to think only within it and fail to see how similar things may be. A good example may be doing a test where a certain percentage makes you pass or fail and one percent makes a difference or we call an unusual person without the money “crazy” but with the money they are – “eccentric”, which then determines how we treat them. There is always a danger that we pay so much attention to boundaries that we don’t see the big picture, but without boundaries it is virtually impossible to grasp anything. So we’re in a pickle and there is always some trade off – in our case trading objective reality and facts for personal clarity, possibility of communication and manageability of the phenomena.

Our whole world is governed by the categories and these categories may be meaningless to someone outside of you own city, state, continent or even family. They are alive and micro or macro contextual notions on how we divide the world up so it is easier to tackle it. We often overestimate the validity of our claims viewed only from the one whole we’ve placed them in and have a proclivity to associate with people and accept data which validate our borders aka confirmation bias – where the only things we see as real are those which confirm what we already think we know. Thinking “out of the box” is hard. “The box” was set in place for a reason. We don’t know what will happen if you remove the boundaries of the box and step outside. What if it shows that multitude of other things we took as fact are just a point of view and can be interpreted completely differently? What if it sends you into an identity crises? This could happen if the holes we’ve build collapse.

So maybe just crack the box open and entertain the possibility that you’re not always right or at least that your stance is not the only one plausible in your limited hole-bound computations. You’ll learn more from people you (respectfully) disagree with. An open mind is great, yet some scaffolding of a box or a dent of a whole is needed to classify something and be able to work with it.