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People have really fantastic pattern-recognition abilities, and it's not just hearing messages
that we expect to hear but it's also visually as well. There's a bunch of really good examples of this.
Now many people have seen this picture, but if you haven't, then it's not going to
make much sense. There are just some black patches on a white background. But what if
I told you that the title of this picture is called "Dalmatian Dog"? Does that help?
Well, if you still can't see it, then savor this moment because once I show you, then
you'll never be able to see this photo in the same way ever again.
Are you ready? All right, here it is.
Now of course you've seen many examples of this. People have reported seeing a face
on Mars, or Elvis in the form of a tree, or even seeing the *** Mary in a toasted cheese
sandwich. We tend to see faces all over the place. In fact, there's a nice website called
Faces in Places where people upload their own photographs of faces that they see in
everyday objects, and it's filled with hundreds of great examples.
People are really good at perceiving patterns. In fact, we're essentially pattern-recognition
machines, particularly for faces.
Many times, our basic pattern-recognition abilities are shaped by really specific expectations
like, "It's fun to smoke marijuana," and once you know what it is that you're
listening for, automatically kind of pops out.
Again, I mean, this is found, for example, like in a Dalmatian dog. Once I tell you,
for example, to look for the Dalmatian dog in the scene, all of the things that aren't
consistent with the Dalmatian dog just fade into the background, and all the things that
are consistent with the Dalmatian dog really pop out. It's this difference between sharpening
things that are consistent with it and leveling the things that are inconsistent with that
specific message. We see this happens a lot, this sharpening and leveling process.
We're going to see this come up again and again throughout the course, where things
float to the top that are consistent with your expectations, and things that aren't
consistent kind of fade into the background. This sort of expectancy effect is really common
throughout cognition, and psychology, more generally.
Many times also, instead of things being shaped by our specific expectations, they're also
shaped by our general expectations, so things like—well, language is a good one. Language—we
aren't even aware, really, of doing any sort of interpretation whatsoever. When you
read a sentence, it just kind of emerges, what the meaning of that sentence is, but
there's all sorts of things like syntax and grammar, obviously spelling, word configurations,
sentence structure. These things are all happening, and you're applying them. You're making
these interpretations without even knowing that there's anything going on. There are
some really good examples of this as well.
In this example by Steve Pinker, our vast experience with language allows us to deal
with these noisy conditions and understand this seemingly garbled passage of text.
The same goes for our ability to interpret bad handwriting, something that humans find
incredibly easy to do. But computer scientists and researchers in machine learning can tell
you about the incredible amount of stored information and processing that's required
for a computer to understand and interpret something as simple as a handwritten postal
code on an envelope. Subjectively, we just open our eyes and apprehend it as humans because
we all have incredible amounts of experience with these sorts of materials that we encounter every day.
We're not even aware of having made an interpretation. I mean, that's what so cool about this stuff,
that when you're listening to Queen backward, again, that message that it's fun to smoke
marijuana, that message, you can't hear. You can't put yourself back into the shoes
of yourself, your previous self before hearing that message. You can't un-hear it. Again,
looking at the Dalmatian dog, you can't un-see the Dalmatian dog. You're forever
tainted. The bits that are consistent with the dog pop out. The bits that are consistent
with "It's fun to smoke marijuana" pop out. You fail to recognize, A: that you're
even making any sort of interpretation whatsoever; and, B: that there are a squillion other ways
that you could've heard or that you could've seen these things.
This is a really important concept, where it's so important we're calling it the
fundamental cognitive error. This is just this idea that we don't recognize that we've
made an interpretation and that there are a million other ways that it could've been interpreted.
It's clear that seeing and hearing both involve considerable knowledge about the world,
but we can also add memory to that list.
I spoke to an expert in the area, Beth Loftus, and she explains some of the research that
she's been working on for decades. It turns out that memory doesn't work as well as we might expect.