We don't see as well as we think we do. Bear with me -- this is going somewhere. Really, the only sharp focus in your entire field of view is a spot about the size of your thumbnail held at arm's length. It doesn't normally seem like that, unless we conciously pay attention. Why not?

Worse than that -- we don't hear as well as we think either. Or feel, or smell, or anything. Why not?

The answer is that we aren't really experiencing the world around us. Our minds run a simulator, updating it (from time to time, here and there) with input from our senses, and that is what we're really experiencing. Here are some examples to prove it to you:

• Have you ever been looking for something and been unable to find it until it's pointed out to you? Of course you have. The shaving cream is right there in front of you, but you can't see it until your significant other says "It's right there! and points to it. Then suddenly it is there, and you can't understand why you didn't see it before. The reason is because it wasn't there in your simulator until some external influence forced your mind to include it.

• If you've ever moved to a totally new place, you've had the experience that the new place is huge, vast, confusing. Until you've lived there awhile, and then it's small and comforting. This is because the "map" of the place isn't in your simulator at first. Every time you turn around, your brain has to sort through hundreds or thousands of impressions because it doesn't already have it all in your simulator.

• Related to that is a little exercise I learned from a fellow who taught me photography. You may find it educational. Take a camera and go to a place you think you know. Close your eyes, turn around a few times, snap a picture, turn around some more, and then open your eyes. When you get the picture developed, you probably won't recognize it. This is because you unconciously frame a photograph based on what you already expect to see (because of what is in your simulator). Try this little exercise -- you will be amazed.

• Have you ever experienced deja vue? This is where you go to someplace totally new to you, but it feels very familiar, as if you've been there before. This happens because your simulator is pulling up a simulation based on something you have seen before. The experience isn't perfect, because the reality doesn't really match the simulation very well, but the experience is quite eerie.

• Somewhat less common is jamais vue. This is where you are in a familiar place, but it feels like a strange place. This is because your simulator is not pulling up the familiar simulation, but is instead treating it like a novel situation (as with moving to a strange place, mentioned above).

• Even less common is presque vue, which is where you are in a familiar place, and it feels like a familiar place, but it also feels as if there are things about it that you aren't quite seeing. This is caused by your simulator adding things that your senses don't indicate. This is a harder one to explain, but I think it's caused by your simulator pulling up the wrong simulation, so you keep getting hints of things that aren't there. This is rare, but is even more eerie than deja vue.

• When you see something totally new, it takes awhile for it to make sense. I've had this happen a few times watching far-out movies, but also in other contexts. Your eyes just can't grasp the sense of what you're looking at until it has been integrated into your simulator.

So far, this isn't all that revolutionary. Lots of people have theorized that what we see isn't really the world around us. I am, perhaps, going a bit farther than most, since I am presuming that our senses are very much poorer than we normally think. The world does not appear to us to be a big fuzzy blur with one sharply focused spot, because that is not how our simulator presents it to us. But that is how our eyes present it to us. Similar things happen with all of our senses, but it's harder to explain or demonstrate because we are so strongly visually oriented.

But now I will take a bit of a departure. I don't think our memories are all that good either. Just as we see the real world as a simulator updated by little bits of real-world input, I think we experience memories as simulations based on little bits of remembered input. It is well understood by police and criminal investigators that the worst sort of evidence is eye-witness accounts. This is because five spectators to the same sequence of events will give five totally different accounts of what happened. All will give quite detailed reports, and all the reports will differ markedly as to the details, and usually as to the gross facts as well. Your quite vivid recollection of an event will differ markedly from that of others, who have just as vivid a recollection as you -- just different. Anyone who is married, or who has had a "significant other" for any length of time, will have ample proof of this.

All of this is well established. Where I am adding to what I have heard or read before is in explaining the "why" of it. Just as your eyes do not report the entirety of what you see, serving only to enable your internal simulator to recreate the world around you, so also your memory does not report the entirety of what you remember, serving only to enable your internal simulator to reconstruct the memory you think you have.

I'm not sure quite where this insight gets us, but at least it's worth knowing.

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