If you’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman or Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (and if you haven’t you should; great books), then you’ve been given countless of examples on how our brain function and that a repeating theme is that our brain is really eager to fill in the blanks.

This tendency can work for us and it can work against us. What I’ve also found is, by being presence and tuned into this phenomenon, it can also entertain. Mesmerise oneself over how… well stupid and irrational we truly are.

A simple way to test this is to watch the movie Arrival, featuring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker.

SPOILER ALERT

With our learned understanding of conventional story structure we create the assumption that the death of the main characters daughter came before the arrival and that the recollections of her daughter’s birth, growth and death are from the past and not from the future.

The director Denis Villeneuve basically tricks us (by, among other things, showing warm tone memories leading us to assume they’ve flashbacks) and have us fill in the blanks.

What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.