We put a post up of the local Highlands community facebook pages to say that website upgrades would mean the site would be down for a short period.
As the weekend was set aside for the website upgrade we did not have time to shoot an image just for the facebook post, so we got this 'stock' image and put our details on it.
After a few hours about 3500 people saw the notice and about 400 had a closer look.
4 People commented that we should not post an image for a first aid training company that shows someone smoking.
I had to do a double take and recheck the image. To me the image shows a man with a marker pen in his mouth. While others clearly saw a person smoking.
Interestingly at least one of the four who commented said they are a regular smoker.
We all have 'filters' on how we view everything around us. Those filters affect what and how we see things.
These three images came up when I typed in 'filter' on our stock image supplier. Even website filters have difficulty with the word filter!
A smokers filter means they see a cigarrete, through my filter I see a pen.
It actaully makes a lot of sense to use filters or we would spend huges amount of time having to process the threat or value of the thousands of objects and people around us.
The brain is one the most energy hungry parts of the body and with out filters profiling every object and person would take up a huge part of our concentration.
These filters are often called Heuristics, these are the filters that stop me slamming on the brakes of my car at the sight of every person walking on the pavement. But those filters mean I do an emergency stop when a childs ball rolls out from behind a parked car.
We cover how our heuristic filters affect us during first aid. People focus on blood, but do not manage the blocked airway. So we train to give people the filters they need for First Aid.
In mental health we discuss how a difficult colleage may be having a mental health crisis, but we just see unwashed cups in the work kitchen or missed projects deadlines.
Filters or heuristics are vital part of how we function and on our First Aid and Mental Health courses we train and tune our filters to make them more affective in these specific situations.