“It is not warmer outside! It is less cold.” My wife stridently objects to me saying that the weather is warmer on a 25-degree winter day. It might have something to do with my excitement when the temperature doubles five times over the course of a day.

Mostly, it shows how differently people see the world. It is more than a case of the thermometer being half full or half empty. People see the world in fundamentally different ways based on their experiences, or lack thereof.

Many things affect what we see: excitement, fear, joy, awe. Think about how many fish stories have been told over the years. It’s not that people are totally making things up, but the excitement of a big catch slowly magnifies the event over time. A big fish becomes a huge fish in the telling. Ten years later the story of the monster fish reaches epic proportions that are far larger than what really happened. Excitement magnifies experiences and makes them larger.

Snakes are one of those animals that do the same thing. Folks who are scared of snakes tend to see a snake that is a couple of feet longer than the snake really is. A visitor came in to the nature center one summer asking about the 7-foot long snakes that were lurking beside the trail. The longest snake ever seen on the grounds was a watersnake, which was maybe 4 and a half feet long, but fear can make something seem larger than life just as easily as that giant fish caught 10 years ago.

There was an article I read a few years ago about a man who went in search of an Anaconda in South America. He was so excited to see the biggest snake in the world that he didn’t realize until he got home that the Anaconda he saw was only 6 feet long. Excitement “biggerizes” things just as effectively as fear.

Sometimes our brains just don’t have the right experiences to interpret what the eyes are seeing. When I was little, my sister saw a cougar in the backyard. This is something that people talk about a lot. Stories of mountain lions and black panthers are rampant throughout the region.

My sister’s mountain lion turned out to be an exceptionally large orange cat that her brain made bigger. It’s easy to let excitement make things bigger than they are. Does that mean mountain lions aren’t here? No. There is a chance that they pass through the area, though we would see much more evidence if there were a breeding population that was well established. That said, a mountain lion from out west was hit by a car in Connecticut, so it is possible that they move through the area.

Black panthers are another story. These animals are generally jaguars or leopards, neither one of which have ever been here historically. Many black panther sightings may be the result of the brain trying to make sense of something it has never seen before. In the last few years, an animal was released in the area that has not been seen in some time. It is dark, dark brown, with cat-like ears and a long tail and can be almost 4 feet long. This animal is known as a “fisher,” also called a “fisher cat,” for its cat-like appearance. Even though the fisher looks similar to a cat, it is more closely related to river otters, mink and other weasels. Could a brain interpret this giant, cat-like weasel as a panther? If a house cat can be seen as a mountain lion, it’s not a big stretch of the imagination to turn a fisher into a black panther.

It’s such a hard thing, because there is no brain download to see exactly what another person really saw. Words are not always the best way to get an idea across. One person sees a black cat run up a trail. Someone right next to them sees a black bear running up the trail. If there are no photos, how do you know who is right? It becomes a giant case of “He says, she says” that reminds me of a playground when I was a kid. It’s not worth much debate if neither side has any kind of proof.

How much do our expectations shape our experiences? One person expects that the only black animal in the wild is a bear and is more likely to see a bear. I’m guilty of that myself. My brain tried to turn a tiny white dog into a weasel or a snowshoe hare when it was running across the snow-covered pond last winter. It wasn’t that the dog was particularly hard to see, but in those first few seconds of seeing a white animal on the white snow, I tried to make the animal fit into my pre-existing notion of what a white animal in the white snow should be. No matter how hard I tried, that dog wasn’t turning into a snowshoe hare. Within 20 seconds, the true dogginess of the white animal came out.

In the end, it can be hard to make your eyes talk to your brain. The brain gets too excited and jumps to conclusions before slowing down and truly looking. It’s all about perception. Is it warmer or just less frigid? The next time you see something amazing, stop for a second and truly, truly look at it without judgment and see what happens.

Jeff Tome is a naturalist at the Audubon Nature Center in southern Chautauqua County, serving both Warren and Chautauqua counties. The nature center is located at 1600 Riverside Road outside of Jamestown and offering a wide variety of programs. For more information, go to jamestownaudubon.org.