har-ish

The mind does not merely see; it constructs. What we think we recognise becomes easier to recognise the next time, until interpretation begins to feel indistinguishable from fact. This is one of the great gifts of the brain: repetition can make learning, memory and habit more effortless. But the same machinery can turn a subjective impression into a conviction, and a conviction into a cage. Perhaps this is why arguments about what we “really” saw, meant or experienced are so often less about the object itself than about the private architecture each of us has built around it.