The example picture for this entry shows two woman who have been posed for an advertising picture.
The women’s hair has been fanned out around their heads to provide a large area for the hair coloring they are advertising.
The experience of most people would lead them to glance at the picture in it’s advertising format in a magazine, read the label’s that were on the hair and on the product accompanying the picture of the woman, and see only the obvious. An advertisement for a hair coloring product that used two woman models with different colored hair to advertise the product.
There is an interesting observation that can be made about this picture if the viewer has been exposed to a particular kind of experience. If the viewer thinks in a specific way because of exposure to certain kinds of knowledge, they might see more than just an advertisement for hair coloring.
If you are truly interested in learning about the real world, you must observe every detail of everything around you. It can be helpful to imagine yourself as a detective or an investigator whose job is to look at every single object and try to put what they see into some kind of framework that fits the situation they are investigating.
Detectives and investigators do not just accept what they are given as evidence. They look at the evidence from every possible angle they can imagine to try to find clues that will help them with their goal. The individual who wants to learn about what life is really about needs exactly that attitude. Looking at everything they see from many different angles until they can see something that was not visible to them from an initial inspection.
Take the example picture of the two woman for example.
The picture seems to be nothing more than an ad. An investigator would not accept that obvious conclusion. An investigator would look at the picture from different angles and with different mindsets. For instance. The picture could be flipped so the woman with red hair is on the bottom and the girl with blondish hair is on top.
Other than looking at a different girl’s face, and the light and dark colored hair switching sides, the picture remains basically the same. It still shows two women with their hair fanned out around both of them in an elliptical shape.
An investigator might then turn the picture sideways to see if that stimulated any new thinking.
Other than the woman’s heads being oriented sideways instead of vertically, and the hair being oriented vertically instead of horizontally, the sideways rotated picture looks mostly the same as the normal picture or the inverted picture. There does not seem to be anything to learn by changing the orientation of the picture in any way.
A next possible approach would be to look at the hair pattern. The dark hair forms a semicircular shape on the right side of the picture,
while the light colored hair forms a semicircular shape to the left side of the picture.
There does not seem to be any kind of inspiration from either the previous pictures highlighting the semicircular shape of the hair on either side of the women’s heads, or a picture with both semicircular hair shapes highlighted.
There are not many options left for an investigator to try in attempting to figure out what they could be missing in this advertising picture for a hair coloring product.
One more thing that could be tried would be to highlight the area enclosed by each hair color. This picture outlines the area covered by the dark hair.
This picture outlines the area covered by the light colored hair.
Outlining the areas covered by each color hair does not seem to reveal anything about the picture either, nor does outlining the areas covered by each hair color in the same picture.
And this is where “What you see depends on how you think”. An investigative mindset used to examine the picture found nothing significant through manipulating the photograph in any immediately familiar or obvious way. There appears to be nothing at all to this picture other than an ad for hair coloring.
There is something more to this picture if you have been exposed to a particular type of information. If you have not been exposed to that information, it will literally be impossible for you to see what it is that is significant about this picture.
If the investigative mind examining this picture has been exposed to a certain type of knowledge, they might outline the picture in the following way.
What knowledge must the investigator have been exposed to in order to create the outline on the picture above? Yin Yang Theory.
Yin Yang Theory is a theory of the universe that was developed in Asia, reputedly thousands of years ago. Yin Yang Theory is associated with a symbol that is said to represent what Yin Yang Theory means. That symbol, commonly known as the “Yin Yang Symbol”, is shown next.
The two woman’s heads and the way their hair is colored and spread out around them look like a Yin Yang Symbol.
What you see depends on how you think. If you have never heard of Yin Yang Theory or seen a Yin Yang symbol, it will be impossible for you to see the Yin Yang symbol formed by the woman’s hair and head.