Read It Twice

I love researching for a Facebook group my daughter started: The Smilers. Anything that brings a smile to your face everyday can be shared there. But it’s a private group, so you have to ask to join. Recently, I’ve been Googling funny signs, and this one was included. It stopped me in my tracks. Like you, on first reading, I ‘corrected’ the error without a second thought.

Remember what I’ve said before: you see what you expect to see.

This is so true for almost everything you believe or ‘know to be real’. Your mind looks for patterns and when it sees what it’s looking for, it slides on to the rest to keep searching for more. But it ‘thinks’ it understands what it has seen. That’s how you get fooled.

I’m combining the idea of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ to illustrate my point: the brain is the machine, but the mind is the operating system. You are the observer, and when your mind mistakes what the brain has seen, you will find that you have to repeat the interaction to see what went wrong.

Here ends the lesson.