 So, people have really fantastic pattern recognition abilities, and it's not just hearing messages that we expect to hear, but it's also visually as well, and there's a bunch of really good examples of this. Now, many people have seen this picture, but if you haven't, then it's not going to make much sense. They're just black patches on a white background. But what if I told you that the title of this picture is called Dalmatian Dog? Does that help? Well, if you still can't see it, then savor this moment, because once I show you, then you'll never be able to see this photo in the same way ever again. You ready? All right, here it is. Now, of course, you've seen many examples of this. People have reported seeing a face on Mars, or Elvis in the form of a tree, or even seeing the Virgin Mary in a toasted cheese sandwich. We tend to see faces all over the place. In fact, there's a nice website called Faces in Places where people upload their own photographs of faces that they see in everyday objects, and it's filled with hundreds of great examples. People are really good at perceiving patterns. In fact, we're essentially pattern recognition machines, particularly for faces. So many times, our basic pattern recognition abilities are shaped by really specific expectations, like it's fun to smoke marijuana, and once you know what it is that you're listening for, automatically it pops out. Again, this is found, for example, like in a Dalmatian dog. Once I tell you, for example, to look for the Dalmatian dog in the scene, all of the things that aren't consistent with the Dalmatian dog just fade into the background, and all of the things that are consistent with the Dalmatian dog really pop out. So it's this kind of difference between sharpening things that are consistent with it and leveling the things that are inconsistent with that specific message. We see that this happens a lot, this sort of sharpening and leveling process, and we're going to see this come up again and again throughout the course, where things float to the top that are consistent with your expectations and things that aren't consistent and kind of fade into the background, and this sort of expectancy effect is really common throughout cognition and psychology more generally. Many times also, instead of things being shaped by our specific expectations, they're also shaped by our general expectations. So things like, well language is a good one, so language, we aren't even aware really of kind of doing any sort of interpretation whatsoever, right? When you read a sentence, it just kind of emerges what the meaning of that sentence is, but there's all sorts of things like syntax and grammar, obviously spelling, word configurations, sentence structure. These things are all kind of happening and you're applying them, you're making these interpretations without even knowing that there's anything going on. And there's some really good examples of this as well. In this example by Steve Pinker, our vast experience with language allows us to deal with these noisy conditions and understand this seemingly garbled passage of text. The same goes for our ability to interpret bad handwriting, something that humans find incredibly easy to do, but computer scientists and researchers in machine learning can tell you about the incredible amount of stored information and processing that's required for a computer to understand and interpret something as simple as a handwritten postal code or an envelope. But subjectively, we just open our eyes and apprehend it as humans because we all have incredible amounts of experience with these sorts of materials that we encounter every day. So we're not even aware of having made an interpretation, I mean that's what's so cool about this stuff that when you're listening to Queen Backward again, that message, that it's fun to smoke marijuana, that message you can't hear, you can't put yourself back into the shoes of yourself, your previous self before hearing that message. You can't unhear it again and looking at the Dalmatian dog, you can't unsee the Dalmatian dog, you're forever tainted. The bits that are consistent with the dog pop out. The bits that are consistent with its fun to smoke marijuana pop out and you fail to recognize A, that you're even making any sort of interpretation whatsoever and B, that there are a squillion other ways that you could have heard or that you could have seen these things and this is a really important concept where it's so important we're calling it the fundamental cognitive error and this is just this idea that we don't recognize that we've made an interpretation and that there are a million other ways that it could have been interpreted. It's clear that seeing and hearing both involve considerable knowledge about the world but we can also add memory to that list. So I spoke to an expert in the area, Beth Loftus, and she explained some of the research that she's been working on for decades and it turns out that memory doesn't work as well as we might expect.