Mental Regexp


05/04/2005

Have you ever noticed your own mental pattern matching?

You know when your kid asks to help look for the missing large red action figure, and you look all over and can’t find it either? And it’s because the action figure in question is really blue, and is sitting on the shelf right in front of you?

Happens to me all the time. I set my “mental regexp” filter to something like “red toy” and that’s all I’ll see, even though the correct (albeit blue) toy is right there.

Now this presents a bit of a problem: you can’t just open the filter up to ”.*” and accept everything; you’d be overwhelmed with input. But with even slightly wrong criteria in place, you’ll miss the very thing you’re looking for (just as with a slightly-off regexp).

And of course, this presupposes we always set our filters consciously. It appears that we don’t: we ignore critical input all the time because of faulty filters. If we didn’t, then Scott Adams would be out of a job…

Just something to thing about over the weekend. What are your filters set to?


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