In an 'attention economy' built on ever-more targeted information, how well do we understand our perceptions anymore? Attention is becoming a scarce commodity, and reclaiming it can be a challenging exercise. Yet at its core, is a surprisingly simple philosophy — one that Harvard Psychologist Helen Langer calls a type of 'mindfulness'. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman refers to it as a type of slow system of thought, NYU Psychologist Johnathan Haidt calls it the rider and the elephant, while the modernist artist Mark Rothko explores it as a type of human visual foundation. However one approaches it or phrases it, the idea of 'Other' thinking is not simply an opposing category or an unwanted perspective, but is the heart of how we see, process and learn. We may still disagree with other notions of TRIBE, or expressions of LOOK, or a sense of GRACE, or simply laugh at the theatres of PROMISE, but a biased approach to these ideas is often difficult to resist. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern our perceptions when so much of our understandings take place automatically, beneath the surfaces of what we see. To explore the influences of our involuntary perceptions requires a patience to grasp what shapes them, and more importantly, to consciously steal back a lost span of attention.

Despite feeling above them, we are all vulnerable to patterns of automatic thought or biases that can steer our definitions into what psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman call heuristics (or mental shortcuts). After all, we are human, and we use mental shortcuts in a fantastic variety of flavours to help us navigate issues at a glance. Sometimes helpful but more often destructive, these techniques are used in our public theatres of advertising, political rhetoric or social dialogue to jumpstart conclusions of conformity, spirituality, sympathy, or balance while often using unproven foundations to base them on. In our modern 'attention economy', becoming dependent on these shortcuts as thinking tools can quickly erode our capacities for deeper thought about more significant, more nuanced possibilities. What 'other thinking' proposes is a pause in these routines — no matter how beholden we are to them — to cross into a terrain of what psychologists call perspective diversity.

Simone Weil once argued that prayer was a form of learned attention. Through our era of ephemeral thinking, 'attention' has become one of our highest forms of prayer.

Arranged as mosaics that reflect our media-centric lives, the 12 degrees each represent a category of image and behaviour that we seldom pay attention to in ourselves, and less so in the lives of others. The challenge is to study routine groups from alternate angles — or to read images as sentences with shape, syntax, history, and broader contexts of influence. The process can be unnerving or just plain stressful, but they illustrate a point about our perceptions — they are more vulnerable to unconscious impressions than we might realize. According to psychologists, when faced with what appears to be unfamiliar or complex relationships, we often substitute obvious ones —or "heuristics" — without being aware of it. The greater goal is to suggest a way of approaching our reactions with a type of philosophical checklist in mind — one that might conjure perspectives that differ from first instincts— to maintain an integrity to how we see and interpret the world. The 12 Degrees create a type of mental gymnastics to explore this. Together, the two volumes provide a sampling of different contexts, biases, and processes that silently affect us beneath our skins.

At times, this model of thinking might require a more collaborative effort, borrowing thoughts from philosophers, poets, artists, physicists or cultural leaders past and present to help better understand our seeing ways. They all, in different ways, foster a certain kind of courage to not look away in hurried indifference, but to face the more profound questions shaping others and ourselves. Borrowing from the efforts of these thinkers, Otherness asks not for reactions based on ever smaller, more biased beliefs, but for a more diverse approach to the contexts and behaviours connecting our unseen nature. As we grow increasingly polarized into more righteous, fragmented and immoveable tribes, what is often lost are the efforts to discover and trace the many intelligences and histories that might bind the ‘I’ that ‘We’ are. With a kind of historical, or evolutionary approach, we can begin to weave the threads of our own isolated beliefs into the tapestry of a larger whole. As many physicists, artists, writers, and politicians from past and present suggest, there must be something deeply hidden behind everything. Connecting them remains our task and our’s alone.