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.