PsychMyths and Applying Psychology To Everyday Life

Your Brain Hates Incompleteness AND Inconsistency - Filling In The Holes

We have two different principles to add to our collection so we can understand why and how people get things wrong.

The Brain Hates Incompleteness

The Berlin School of Experimental Psychology was founded in 1893 and gave rise to Gestaltism. Later on things got confused a bit when therapist Fritz Perls started calling his rather odd way of doing therapy the Gestalt approach. They use similar language but tend to be quite different.

The Gestalt school involved using experimental psychology techniques to study PERCEPTION, and established a number of principles that have stood the test of time.

Take a look at the image below:

What do you see? If you are like most, you would say: "I see a circle".

But it is NOT a circle. A circle requires an unbroken line, and this is just a bunch of dots. If I was to ask you tomorrow what you say, and not having given you the hint, you would remember "circle".

Another:

If I ask you to remember the image above, and tomorrow I ask you to draw it for me, chances are you will draw a COMPLETE closed circle. The image, though, isn't a complete closed circle. It's not a circle at all, but you'd draw it as one.

Perceptually and Cognitively, We Fill In Blanks

We have a very strong tendency to fill in blanks when we have missing information. Remember that the prime directive of the brain is to reduce its information load, and filling in the blanks serves that purpose. It takes less "bytes" to describe and remember a complete circle, than it does to describe the circle directly above. You can test this out by giving someone instructions to draw a complete circle and then instructions to draw the figure above.

The latter will be MUCH longer.

Confabulation is a term used to describe a process by which people with impaired cognition and brain functions, resulting from dementia, Alzheimers, and alcoholism will actually "make up" events to fill in the blanks in their memories. They don't lie, per se. They often don't even know they are making things up, but they do. Because of both impaired cognition AND memory, the things they make up to fill in the w(holes) are sometimes completely illogical, so they are easily spotted.

Implications For Real Life

When you combine the brain's tendencies to reduce information load, complete holes in its understanding or memory, and reduce uncertainty, you have the tools to explain why so much of what you think you know is, in many respects, wrong. In many cases what you know is "good enough", but as things get more and more complex, you will start to make bad decisions, or decisions based on faulty information.

There's one more principle we need to look at and that's how the brain deals with inconsistent information, or dissonance.

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