So how does the the human brain ignore the second the?
In: Biology
I’m guessing people who are learning English won’t skip it naturally as they are not used to the patterns and are more focussed on piecing together the meaning?
Short version: Our brains are tuned for pattern recognition and prediction, not detail. That’s also why things that break the expected pattern/outcome can be so jarring. Sometimes it’s in a fun way, though. See movie twists, stage magic, joke punchlines and so on.
It’s a filtering mechanism. Ignore the leaves, see the broken up/partial shape or movement of the predator hiding behind them.
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Brains are lazy. They are quick to guess, and they “check” the guess as lazily as possible.
More accurately; brains need to be as fast as possible while using as little energy as possible, so we can out-compete everything else and not get killed – same as all life. That’s what makes you successful; use the minimum resources to get what you need. Which is why life takes short-cuts – as long as they work more often than not…
It applies to all levels of things; from your example, to people more readily believing things they already know more than anything new to them – regardless of reality.
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Superfluous information. Your conscious mind has what it came for and discards the rest. Think if it as data compression.
Your typical mp3 song sounds indistinguishable from lossless wave yet it’s a tenth of the size because all those high sounds you can’t hear anyways gets discarded.
Mostly these shortcuts are very useful to us but it can be a vulnerability to be exploited.
Source: A whole lotta thinking about it.
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