I like to think I perceive the world as it is. Funny, huh? Even my three year old granddaughter knows not to trust her senses all the time. Sometimes we’re fooled by them.

Why don’t we perceive our universe as it is?

Can you perceive an electron flying around in an atom? Or perceive a single flutter of a hummingbird’s wings? Our senses are so slow and limited, we must rely upon our brains to make up for the limitations in real perception.

That’s why slight of hand magic tricks work – because our brains discount what our eyes see in preference for what we EXPECT to see. Our predictive powers of thought get in our way sometimes. It’s not all bad – sometimes predictions work out fine – like when we watch a bird traverse across our visual field – part of that flight is literally invisible to our eyes, but we see the entire flight path anyway with no loss of apparent visual acuity. We PREDICT the flight path and our brain creates the rest. It’s an astounding ability – that has limitations.

I’ve tried on numerous occasions to catch a fly in flight. Sometimes I can do it, but usually I don’t. Why? Because my eyesight is not fast enough nor my eye-to-hand coordination adequate to keep up with the little bugger! So I have to rely upon my ability to predict his location and snap my hand to that position to catch him. Usually the fly does not behave according to my predictions – so I use an assist, the fly swatter.

The more esoteric readers of this blog might ask me to consider fly mind reading instead. Perhaps in another blog post…

Prediction is a perfect method for creating artificial feeds. Oh, yeah, I can predict with some degree of surety that my erroneous predictions will bring about miscommunication, judgment errors, and outright lies to justify myself because I don’t like being wrong.

In fact, I’m likely to stand up for my rights! Hold my head up high! Nose in the air! Because I trust MY predictions to be right – as they always are… <feeder’s crafty grin>