NEW YORK TIMES: …But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings. It’s called “affective realism”: the tendency of your feelings to influence what you see — not what you think you see, but the actual content of your perceptual experience.
Affective realism illustrates a common misconception about the working of the human brain. In everyday life, your brain seems to be a reactive organ. You stroll past a round red object in the produce section of a supermarket and react by reaching for an apple. A police officer sees a weapon and reacts by raising his gun. Stimulus is followed by response.
But the brain doesn’t really work this way. The brain is a predictive organ. A majority of your brain activity consists of predictions about the world — thousands of them at a time — based on your past experience. These predictions are not deliberate prognostications like “the Red Sox will win the World Series,” but unconscious anticipations of every sight, sound and other sensation you might encounter in every instant. These neural “guesses” largely shape what you see, hear and otherwise perceive… (more)
