We Know Reality In Bits And Pieces, Our Mind Invents The Rest
You may never have stopped to think about it, but your mind works in pieces. He receives reality as if they were puzzle pieces – several for each sense – and he has to do the fascinating job of integrating them to form a whole, which we call reality.
It is a constant and continuous work in which not only are there pieces that come from our senses, there are also feelings, thoughts, opinions or memories mixed there, silently.
The bits of the novel
Some time ago I read a delicious story that began like this: “I bought a novel and my dog ate the beginning, the end and several dozen scattered pages of the rest before I had time to start reading it.”
We, too, attend the outside world in this way, as if it were part of a story that our dog had taken a few bites of. However, we are not aware of it since our mind unites and creates where there is no information, so that the story makes sense.
We can’t change it
The story continued: “Not without forcing my dog to meditate on the inappropriateness of his behavior, insistently showing him the place where the price was listed, I set out to assess the inferred damage and to try to save the salvageable.”
As we pointed out before, it is very difficult to make an evaluation of the part of the story that we are missing because almost automatically our mind is in charge of closing these holes. The truth is that in most cases it does not do badly and the patches are quite hidden, hence it is so difficult for us to identify their existence.
Separating what is information from what is nothing more than a hypothesis, more or less probable, is a voluntary task and usually more expensive than implementing these patches. On the other hand, let’s not forget that our brain follows Occam’s razor to the letter and usually goes for the most economical hypothesis for him.
Does something happen because we fill in what is missing?
Not most of the time. We have a pretty smart brain. For example, if we are told that someone got up early this morning, we will assume that they did not do so after 10, or even earlier.
On the other hand, if they tell us that Juan was late for work this morning and that he was also late last week and the previous one, we may think that Juan is late and that perhaps he does not take his work seriously. The fact of thinking that it is because of “this or that” is information that is stapled to the fact and stored in this way.
Our mind is smart and, on many occasions, uses the hypotheses that suit us best. An alternative hypothesis to Juan’s delays may be that he has a problem that really prevented him from being on time. But, for us, this is a more complicated hypothesis.
Our mind protects us
Why is the hypothesis that Juan has a problem more complicated for us than that of Juan has lost interest in work? Because the first. We can do it with Juan directly, but we don’t have enough trust with him to get into his life.
We can also ask someone close to them, but most likely they will raise their eyebrows, hypothesize that we are gossips and give us information that may mislead us even more. On the other hand, if Juan has a problem and we can help, shouldn’t we?
From being calmly in our workplace we would go on to awaken our conscience. This when he wakes up can be a real nuisance, because it distracts us easily and we would end up forcing ourselves to do something about Juan’s problem.
That said, our story ends: “The outcome of the novel seemed especially fortunate to me: one of the most interesting and attractive characters was credited, I don’t know why, to a murder charge, when it was obvious that throughout the Previous pages had not killed anyone or even hinted at such atrocity. The police are about to arrest him when the inspector takes out a cigar and, without us knowing if he smokes it or not, the novel ends ”.
