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Our Jigsaw Puzzle Brain
How we experience what we expect to experience and remain blind to the world as it is
During childhood the human brain is somewhat plastic. This is the period in our lives where we adapt to environmental cues of all kinds: we acquire our native language, we absorb the cultural norms, and we incorporate the local worldview. Once we reach puberty our capacity for adaptation decreases markedly and by the time we reach adulthood most of our hardwiring is complete. We become far less able to deal with novel sensory inputs; instead we attempt to map such inputs to already-known patterns. Our jigsaw-puzzle brain can only accept additional pieces that are the right shape to fit the existing patterns; we can’t cope with pieces that don’t match the shapes we’ve adapted to.
In other words, we don’t necessarily perceive what is out there in the real world; we perceive instead what we expect to be there. This is why beliefs and prejudices persist in the face of clear evidence to the contrary: our brain simply re-orders information to make it conform to existing patterns and discards information entirely where no fit is possible.
Our adult inability to perceive novel inputs ranges across many categories. It is why, for example, tribal societies rarely become democratic in the sense of the word Westerners would…
