Two people can look at the same thing and notice completely different details.
An engineer might see forces and structures. A psychologist might see behaviour. A musician might hear a pattern that someone else misses entirely. Each has learnt to recognise something that was always there, but wasn’t equally visible to everyone.
This is the idea behind what I call Lens Theory: every field you study, skill you develop, and experience you reflect upon can give you another lens through which to perceive the world.
Learning something new changes what you’re able to notice. And when you combine lenses, you can begin to see connections that would have remained hidden through any one perspective alone.
For me, this applies to almost everything in life.
One problem, many perspectives
Medical robotics makes this particularly clear to me.
When developing a robotic system that interacts with a human body, there are many ways to look at the same problem. Mechanically, you might consider the structure, movement, and forces involved. Electrically, you’re thinking about sensors, power, and signals. Through software and control, you consider how the system interprets information and responds.
Then there’s the biology. The human body is part of the problem you’re trying to understand. Its movement, variability, and responses matter.
The clinical lens introduces further questions. What does the clinician need to achieve? What makes a result useful? How will this system fit into the process of caring for a patient?
A design might look excellent through one lens and reveal a serious weakness through another. Perhaps a movement is mechanically achievable, but difficult to control reliably. Perhaps a technically impressive feature contributes very little to the clinical task.
I think good engineering requires moving between these perspectives and understanding how they affect one another. You also need to recognise when someone else has a lens that you lack, and listen to what they can see.
Understanding people
The same idea applies socially.
When someone behaves in a way I find confusing, it can be tempting to settle on a quick explanation. They’re rude. They’re irrational. They don’t care.
But how much have I actually understood?
A psychological lens might lead me to consider their emotions, expectations, or past experiences. Philosophy might help me explore the values and assumptions behind their position. Neuroscience might prompt questions about attention, learning, or the effects of stress.
These perspectives can give me better questions to ask. They can also remind me how much I don’t know.
Understanding a general principle about human behaviour doesn’t mean I know why a particular person acted a certain way. I still need to listen to them. Otherwise, I risk using my knowledge to construct a more elaborate version of my original assumption!
For me, the value of these lenses is that they create room for curiosity before judgement.
What I see when I play piano
Piano is another place where my interests overlap.
There’s the musical experience: the sound, the phrasing, the emotion, and the pleasure of playing a piece I love. Alongside that, I find myself thinking about the biomechanical control of my fingers and the mechanisms through which the brain learns and adapts.
A passage that sounds effortless can involve an extraordinary amount of coordination. The timing of each movement, the control of force, the relationship between the fingers, wrist, and arm—all contribute to what eventually reaches the listener.
Thinking about learning gives practice another dimension too. When I work on a difficult passage, I can appreciate that I’m gradually developing the ability to execute something that initially felt unfamiliar.
That perspective helps me value the process. It makes the small improvements interesting, even before I can play the whole piece as I’d like.
And understanding more about the movement doesn’t take away from the music. For me, it adds to the wonder of being able to produce it.
The beauty of human movement
I experience something similar with calisthenics.
You can watch a difficult movement and appreciate the strength or skill it requires. But through biomechanics, there is even more to see: leverage, balance, joint positions, and the coordination of multiple parts of the body.
A change in position can make a movement dramatically harder. Extending a limb changes the leverage. Maintaining a shape can require considerable effort even when, to an observer, very little appears to be happening.
Complex movements become particularly fascinating when you consider how many things must work together for them to look smooth.
This is one of my favourite aspects of acquiring a new lens. Something I already enjoyed becomes richer. I can appreciate the movement as a physical achievement and also as an intricate example of what the human body can do.
Combining lenses
The lenses themselves don’t belong exclusively to the activities through which you acquired them.
Biomechanics helps me think about both calisthenics and piano. What I learn about the brain can influence how I approach practice and how I think about behaviour. Engineering gives me ways to examine interactions between parts of a system, while clinical knowledge helps me ask whether the system is solving a worthwhile problem.
This is why I find it difficult to regard my interests as entirely separate.
Sometimes the connection is immediately useful. Other times, it simply changes how I experience something. I notice a detail, appreciate a difficulty, or find a question I wouldn’t previously have thought to ask.
I think that’s a good reason to learn things even when their usefulness isn’t obvious in advance. You don’t always know where a lens will become valuable.
Knowing the limits of a lens
There is a responsibility that comes with this way of thinking.
A lens directs your attention. It helps you see certain things clearly, but it can also encourage you to overlook others.
If I approach every human interaction as an engineering problem, I may miss what someone needs emotionally. If I find an appealing biological explanation for a behaviour, I might pay too little attention to the person’s circumstances or their own account of what happened.
And knowing a little about several fields doesn’t give me the expertise of someone who has spent years studying one of them.
I want to collect lenses while remaining aware of their limits. That means being willing to change perspective, question an analogy, and ask for help.
The point is to expand my understanding. If a favourite lens becomes the only one I’m willing to use, I’ve lost something important.
A reason to keep learning
Longevity gives this idea another dimension.
A longer life offers more time to learn, experience, and develop different ways of seeing. In turn, those perspectives can make the years themselves more interesting.
I want to remain capable of being fascinated by things. To hear more in a piece of music, understand more of a movement, and approach an unfamiliar person or problem with more than my first impression.
That’s what Lens Theory means to me. Every new lens creates another opportunity to engage with the world—and combining them can reveal possibilities I wouldn’t have seen before.
What have you learnt that changed the way you see something else?