How to See What Others Don’t & What Pain Is Really Telling You-SYSK Choice

77.553 - 92.509 Amy Herman

It's not so much about looking closely. It's thinking about not only what do you see, but what aren't you seeing. It's called the pertinent negative. And the practical example I can give you is, for anyone who's a parent, you know that what your children don't say to you is just as important as what they do.

92.607 - 101.576 Mike Carruthers

Also, why you should smile a lot more often. And all the things you never knew about pain and pain relievers, like Tylenol.

101.596 - 116.431 Dr. Aneesh Singla

We actually don't fully understand how Tylenol works, even though it's been around for a long time, but we believe it works by a central mechanism. A lot of people think that, you know, it's either ibuprofen or Tylenol, but believe it or not, you can actually take both together and they actually work on slightly different mechanisms.

116.991 - 119.914 Mike Carruthers

All this today on Something You Should Know.

122.358 - 138.699 Hillary Frank

Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.

404.522 - 424.18 Amy Herman

So if I go into a situation knowing that the way I'm looking at it is not the only way to see it, I'm going to open myself up to listening to what other people have to say about their perspective, and it will give me other insights. People cannot, in a myriad of situations, cannot say, well, I see it this way, and that's the way it is.

424.44 - 438.924 Amy Herman

That just doesn't work physiologically, intellectually, ethically. In any way. So by helping people hone their visual intelligence, I'm bringing them around at the risk of making a terrible pun to see that there's always more than one way to see something.

438.944 - 445.737 Mike Carruthers

So how do you hone your visual intelligence and see things differently than the way you see them now?

446.324 - 463.869 Amy Herman

That's the whole crux of what I do. I show people how to look at works of art because we can talk about it. We can go back and forth and talking about what you see and what I see. But if we have no visual ground on which to anchor these assumptions that we're making, we're saying, well, this is what I see. I use art as the common ground.

464.37 - 482.136 Amy Herman

And so I work with people across professions to look at art together to illustrate how differently we see things. And art is not threatening. Everybody sees something. But we can all look at the same painting or sculpture and photography. Ten people can look at it and we'll have nine different perspectives.

1283.22 - 1300.202 Amy Herman

Put my cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso and put the whole thing on my credit card, please. And in about five seconds, everything changed. She turned around and said to me, well, bless your heart. I know what that really means. But, you know, she said, nobody's done anything that nice for me in months. I said, look, you're having a bad day.

1300.222 - 1319.41 Amy Herman

If I can buy your coffee and it makes it better for five minutes, we all win. So we walked out of Starbucks. I made my plane. I made the connection. I got my caffeine. I paid for her coffee. Win, win, win, win. That's what I mean about shifting your situational awareness. It doesn't always have to be life-saving to make a difference to somebody else.

1320.07 - 1326.98 Mike Carruthers

Whereas most people in that Starbucks never took their eyes off their phone and never looked up and never talked to anybody.

1327 - 1329.964 Amy Herman

That is correct. That is absolutely spot on.

1391.031 - 1409.059 Amy Herman

I never got around to telling her that I couldn't talk. We just talked. I listened. She was lovely. And when we finally got to LaGuardia, I said, you know, I wasn't my best. Maybe we can exchange cards and have lunch sometime. I kind of had a headache on the flight. And she said, oh, no, I don't give anyone my card. I said, but you just spoke to me for two hours. Why won't you give me your card?

1409.66 - 1422.681 Amy Herman

She took mine. She said, because I'm a literary agent and everyone has a story to tell. But you have a story to tell and you're going to write a book and it's going to be on the New York Times bestseller list. And I'm going to be your agent. That was 12 years ago. She's my agent.

1423.049 - 1437.709 Mike Carruthers

Well, what's so fun about this is that you've taken something that we all do to a greater or lesser degree and created it as a topic to discuss. This idea of visual intelligence is really something to pay attention to.

1438.791 - 1456.319 Amy Herman

How do you think, you know, when you buy coffee at a coffee truck and guy says, oh, I remember you, two creams, one sugar. How do they know that? Because they remember my glasses. They remember what time I come. You know, it's about human relationships. When someone goes into a diner and says, I'll have the regular. Well, how does the waitress know what the regular is?

1456.379 - 1477.893 Amy Herman

Because they're making note of the visual information. It's good business. It's good people skills. And it's not just about solving crime. But, you know, why do sponges get people, get left in people after, why do, you know, surgical tools get left in people's bodies? Because they don't say out loud, have you taken the scalpel out? Let's do a checklist. Three sponges were used today.