Science has an explanation. The next time a friend or family member brings up your worst ex and asks you, for the billionth time, why you dated that loser for so long, you can simply place the blame on the perceptual processes of your brain.
“Our brains, you could say, are the original autocorrectors. In her book Being Wrong – a meditation on human error of all kinds – Kathryn Schulz explains how we constantly take sensory messages from the world and unconsciously alter them slightly. She points out that, for the most part, these alterations serve us well: take the blind spot, which is the part of the eye where the optic nerve passes through the retina and blocks the reception of visual information. Even though each of us has one, none of us sees blanks in our field of vision, she says, ‘because our brain automatically corrects the problem’.”
