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By Root 969 0

students and me. Everyone followed instructions and the scenery along the route was virtually identical. But as we watched the videos, all of us were amazed at how each of us looked around as we walked. One student with rather low self-esteem looked at the ground most of the time, rarely looking at anyone’s face as they came along. Two younger students carefully checked out anyone of the opposite sex. Another person froze in front of the gum display comparing the relative prices of the different brands. I was particularly struck by the video of one of the very tall males who was a foot taller than I am. He scanned over the top of everyone’s heads and saw the world in ways I never imagined.

Most of my students could guess which video segment was filmed by which person simply because they knew each other’s interests, values, personalities, and, in one case, height. Each person tended to look at objects, people, and the world in different ways. Their brains processed their walks differently because each person took in different information. Had I interviewed each student in detail about their walk to the drugstore, they would have used different content words to describe it. I suspect that had we analyzed their content words, we would have discovered something about who they were—just as we would have with their use of function words.

SEEING YOURSELF THROUGH A BOTTLE

A couple of years after the camera-hat exercise, I was in a conversation with one of my beginning graduate students, Cindy Chung. Cindy, a native Canadian, had spent her entire life in Toronto. She had just moved to Texas and was finding the state a bit different from any place she had ever seen or imagined. Perhaps because of the brutally hot weather at the time, she felt the need to carry around a bottle of water everywhere. I think she believed that a blinding sandstorm could blow in at any time and it was important to be prepared. As we spoke about the nature of language and perception, we each made reference to the different ways people might see her water bottle. Somehow the water bottle became the focus of the discussion. In fact, we took a picture of the bottle and had other people tell us about it.

Cindy’s actual water bottle:

Since that discussion in 2002, thousands of people have seen this bottle and have taken part in a brief five-minute bottle exercise. If you would like to try out the bottle experiment, go to www.SecretLifeOfPronouns.com and click on the link “Perceptual Style: You are what you see.” In fact, I would urge you to try it out before reading any farther. We’ll wait here. If you didn’t go to the website, the instructions are straightforward: For the next 5 minutes, write what you see in the picture as if you were describing it to someone who hadn’t seen it. Write continuously. Below the picture is a writing area along with a small timer that tells you when the five minutes have elapsed. Go ahead and look at the picture and imagine what you would write over the next five minutes.

The ways people write about the bottle vary a great deal. Some excerpts:

This is a clear plastic bottle looking similar to a water bottle it has a white cap on the bottle there is a red label and I can see the first two letters are I believe OZ the last 2 letters are KA. The label is red with a picture above the lettering. There is also a blue box with small text that is hard to read. Ingredients and company information is in small yellow type …

—61-year-old woman

It is a little plastic bottle of water with a red emblem on it. Its top is white. There is some water in the bottle. Maybe in one third of the bottle there is water. The light comes from the right so the shadow of the bottle lies to the left of the bottle. Some parts of the bottle are shining because of the light …

—25-year-old woman

This is a clear, colorless water bottle. It is about 8 inches tall, and small enough that you could put your hand around it, and still have a finger left over. It has a white screw on cap that keeps the water fresh until you open it, and it also