Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter. We perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly as a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified. The people we see running around in a field are a soccer team. This is why we fall for optical illusions: we have already seen a diagram as some expected shape, before looking again to realise that we have been fooled. It is also why a
...more