The human mind is an amazing thing; it has provided the basis for our language, or society, and our imagination. It is the thing that delineates us as a species and it has immense power. Sometimes that power is not always a good thing as has been shown in a new study which shows that your brain can sometimes see what it wants to rather than what is there.
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The study involved subjects being led through a maze and memorising a sequence of scenes by being given directions for each move they made. Then, while MRI scans were taken of their brain activity the subjects were asked to navigate through the maze by making repeated choices between two options. Ultimately, using decoders to interpret brain activity, the researchers were able to reconstruct what scene the participants pictured in their minds as they progressed through the maze.
What they discovered was that the human sense of objectivity was sometimes overcome by what the brain expected to see. Your brain helps you navigate by continually generating and rationalising enormous amounts of information. As you try to get from one place to another you try to predict what you will see in your mind but as this study shows, sometimes prior belief can override what is logically being seen.
Navigating is not the only time that this phenomenon occurs; the human mind is well known for the triumph of expectation over reality.
