What you see may not be what you get

"What we think of as reality is actually inference, based on a mental model known as a schema. Schemas are enormously useful frameworks for organizing, categorizing and finding relationships between things in a world that, without them, would be complete confusion. So schemas have enormous utility — but they are not reality.

"For centuries, illusionists have exploited (to their benefit and our entertainment) the simple belief that what we see with our eyes is real. That issue has been a subject of ongoing interest within psychology; a brief video demonstrates the McGurk Effect, a simple but powerful reminder how easy it is to separate perception from reality. (To find the video, enter the words “McGurk Effect BBC Horizon” in any search engine or directly in YouTube.)

"Why is this so important? Because investing occurs at the intersection of perception and behavior: how we see the world and how we respond to it. The obstacles to achieving clear perception and sensible behavior are robust and plentiful, external and internal, learned and instinctive. Overcoming them is not easy."

An excerpt from my latest column at ThinkAdvisor.