Comparing Adler And Proctor's Looking Out, Looking In

Reading Response 2: Perception and Poker Until reading the third chapter of Adler and Proctor's Looking Out, Looking In, perception was to me a sixth sense, an unusual blend of reasoning, natural talent, and witchcraft which I possessed due to a gift from above. In the same way scientists replaced unknown phenomena with a descriptive and predictive theory of the world that we see, so did Adler's presentation of the perception process wiped away my mystic understanding of perception. He describes the stages of perception as Selection, Organization, Interpretation, and Negotiation. The selection stage is the first and, to me, the most important stage. In order to grasp clearly the world around you have to know what is important. Which details are important? Adler refers to this process as collecting. This is where people who are truly perceptive thrive. As a avid poker player, I often would look for signs that my opponent did know what that he was given. Beginners often believe that the same sign means the same thing irregardless of who is showing it. From my experience, knowing what to look for is very important, but it does not answer the question. …show more content…
To continue our poker analogy, once you have found the signs you are looking for, is there a pattern to when the signs are present. Does your opponent scratch his nose every time he has pocket aces? Or did he simply have an itchy nose that particular hand. This is in essence of the Organization stage, taking the clues that you selecting, and arranging them so that you can interpret what the mean. Adler refers to this process as sorting. In poker as in life, often one will use their previous experience to arrange the selections that they have made. If you don't select the right close, arranging the clues that you have could be a very difficult