What Can't Be Seen (Dr. Gretchen White, #2)

by Brianna Labuskes

“If you tell the world someone is crazy enough times, the world stops believing them when they say they aren’t,”

“Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger,”

“When assessing any given situation, we’re limited to our own experience, logic, or creativity—but there’s a world of causes and effects out there that you simply can’t imagine. Not understanding that is why some people fall into conspiracy theory rabbit holes.”

On the Viola Kent case, Gretchen had warned Marconi about the human propensity to find connections where none existed. Pareidolia was the technical name for it, and it was the same thing that made kids find shapes in clouds or adults see faces in inanimate objects. Evolutionarily speaking, the impulse was extraordinarily important to humans, whose survival relied on social connections. But it did make people take leaps in connecting unrelated things and could lead to dangerous conspiratorial thinking.

“Reality is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Daniels said blearily. “There’s no such thing as a true reality because we all see it through our own lens. No two people share the same version of reality. And yet we all seem to just accept that we’re all having the same experience.”

“Did you know when you move your head too quickly for your eyes to focus that your brain just guesses at what’s there so you don’t get seasick from the blurry images?” Daniels asked, clearly enjoying the slide into his drunkenness. “A good twenty percent of what we see is actually just our brain filling in the gaps.”

We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are.

Tabby thought about truth and the ways that you could tell stories that were real but were also lies.