posted on Apr, 29 2016 @ 11:29 PM
When I was a yoot, maybe '66 or so, and was first learning how the English language worked at a very tender age, I was very surprised one near
Christmas that Berenstain was spelled with a tain instead of a tein, since I had never ever seen that ending on a name.
So I had been reading it as "stein". One day it sort of jumped off the page at me that it was "stain". And I thought it was a misprint, since I had
been reading it as "stein", because that's the common name suffix. But it wasn't. It was "stain", and I had been seeing what I expected to see,
instead of what was there. It bothered me for a good 15 minutes, because when I went back to look at other sources, it was all 'stain' the entire
time. Which sent me off into a retrospect (without a lot of retro, because I was maybe 3 or 4) about how I had been seeing what I expected instead of
what was actually there.
I think that's the entire "effect". Your mind was substituting in what you expected to see, because Germanic names of that sort end in 'stein' not
'stain'. So you elided the 'error' and subbed in the 'right' spelling in your eye flow. Until you didn't, and it was a big shock that NOW it was all
'stain'. So instead of saying 'wow, I've been visually correcting this to match what I expected, that's f'd up', it's "the universe has been
altered!!!".
The universe is the same. YOU have just noticed something about yourself, and it's f'd up. Yes, you ARE seeing things that aren't there because your
mind is swapping in what it expected to see. That's a big surprise. But it happens ALL THE TIME. It gets worse than that, if you notice that your eyes
are lying about a lot of things. Your memory too.