Do you know this story?

A fortune-teller waits on a hillside overlooking a city. A traveler pauses to ask her “What kinds of people live in the city below?”
The fortune-teller replies, “What kind of people lived in the last city that you visited?”
“Bad people,” the traveler says darkly. “Horrible people.”
“You will find this city’s people to be the same.” The fortune-teller nods. The traveler sighs and moves on.
A second traveler approaches the fortune-teller moments later. “What kinds of people live in the city below?”
“What kind of people lived in the last city in which you visited?”
The second traveler smiles, “Good people. Kind people.”
The fortune-teller nods, “You will find this city’s people to be the same.”

It’s a cliché that we see what we want to see and that we perceive what personal experience has trained us to perceive. Science reinforces the cliché. Doctors investigating Alzheimer’s disease note that when a person is young, the mind collects a lot of new information quickly. This rapid recall capacity allows a child to learn to speak quickly and to pick up physical and mental skills at a faster rate than many adults.

However, as we grow, our brain develops patterns of learning, and we tend to learn new information in ways that are acceptable to our established patterns. This is why a person who grew up speaking English learns to store knowledge first in English rather than Arabic, or why a person trained in medicine will be more likely to remember a chemical reaction rather than a new poem or legal regulation. It’s not that people are less intelligent as adults than as children—it’s that we have more to remember and less space in which to remember it, plus we have more established experiences that reinforce specific facts better than others. (A powerful aid to memory is routine.) It’s easier to remember facts that “fit” into our already established mental storage space than to reconstruct that space from the ground up.

Bill Thompson suggests that these rules of perception and preconception are also found online. Online Search is essentially a means of finding out what we already know, or think we know or think we should know. He notes that this encourages a type of mental assimilation and discourages mental challenges—we slot the facts that we “learn” online into our existing beliefs and ideas. Rather than alter how we think, we simply add to what we think, reinforcing rather than reinterpreting.

Thompson is smart to see that our connections, or how we search for a topic, tend to carry as much weight as the content that we seek out. Like any language, the online world requires us to frame an inquiry and then build upon the answer that is at least implied in the original question. “Is there…?” “Yes/no, there is…”

More than language limits us when we begin any search in the off or online world. We are limited by the information that we can recognize or choose to access and accept. We intuitively seek out information that is compatible with what we already know, information that “makes sense”. We do this because the words and means of expression that we understand best are embedded in our method of research, in our routine.

It’s the common curse of any academic that s/he can only prove or disprove his or her idea. It is hoped that in doing so, new ideas may present themselves, encouraging a new direction of yes/no research. Even science is to a large extent a social enterprise, with certain questions or means of research remaining taboo until some entrepreneurial spirit decides to disregard social pressure and dig up a body to perform an autopsy or write a mathematical treatise that reorganizes the position of the celestial bodies.

What any individual can be surprised to discover is that, on occasion, perception, thought, and search can be completely remodeled. To do so is easier than expected—a new experience, a brand new context, or being asked rather than asking can change everything, or at least not “fit into” any existing preconceptions. It’s a task easily implemented by children out of necessity, but a task that is often avoided by adults out of fear, frustration, or mere inconvenience.

In one of my favorite children’s stories, Alice through the Looking Glass, I made a role model out of the narcissistic and Nietzschean White Queen after reading the following scene:

Alice, standing on the cusp of adulthood, sighs, "I can't believe that!"

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

While I’m not an advocate of taking every idea presented as credible, there’s something to be said for exploring the potential of a new thought pattern, even if unconventional can be a bit inconvenient.