Jenn McKinlay: The other day the Hub asked me about a decorative tile on the wall. His question: "How long has that been hanging there?"
I glanced at the tile. It was a gift from my mom to commemorate our trip to Florence, Italy in 2007. Yes, the tile has been hanging in the same spot in a doorway for SEVENTEEN YEARS. Now I'm not picking on the Hub, but of the two of us he is less likely to notice things like cat hurl on the floor, a dead houseplant, or where the ketchup is in the refrigerator--this is known as "male refrigerator blindness" in our house.
All teasing aside, I don't think it's a gender issue as I've had female roommates who never noticed the dishes piling up in the sink, the pile of shoes by the door that you had to vault over to enter or exit, or that the guy they were crushing on was just not that into them. Ahem.
Because we're all mystery buffs here and our brains naturally go to crime, I'll share the stats that the levels of accuracy for police lineups is 80% for sequential (one at a time) lineups and 76% for simultaneous lineups. In other words, not great.
And I know that we've all had the experience of witnessing something that the person beside us also observed but saw it completely differently. It can be maddening and you find yourself thinking one of you has the observational skills of a rutabaga and you're positive it's the other person.
Naturally, I had to look for a quiz on observation just to see how I rated. You can find it here: How observant are you?
I was chuffed to get this ranking:
So what makes a person observant? The short answers from the articles I read were curiosity, active listening, mindfulness, and a desire to be constantly learning. I feel as if these traits go hand in hand with being writers and readers.
Now I ask you -- how do you think you rate on the observational scale, Reds and Readers? And if you take the quiz, what did you get?
