As we go about our lives, striving to improve in areas such as sports, music, sales, experiment design, and building things, we constantly make assumptions and form connections about how the world works. These connections, which are deeply ingrained in our minds, often go unnoticed. They only come to light when our actions produce outcomes that contradict our expectations. These connections shape our perception of reality and serve as a foundation for generating future expectations. It is important to acknowledge that we do not have special access to the underlying mechanisms of even the most familiar phenomena and experiences.

Braden has had a similar experience in his work with professional athletes. Over the years, he has made a point of talking to as many of the world’s top tennis players as possible, asking them questions about why and how they play the way they do, and invariably he comes away disappointed. “Out of all the research that we’ve done with top players, we haven’t found a single player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does,” Braden says. “They give different answers at different times, or they have answers that simply are not meaningful.”

“Almost every pro in the world says that he uses his wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he hits a forehand,” Braden says…”We can tell with digitized imaging whether a wrist turns an eighth of a degree. But players almost never move their wrist at all…How can so many people be fooled? People are going to coaches and paying hundreds of dollars to be taught how to roll their wrists over the ball, and all that’s happening is that the number of injuries to the arm is exploding.”

An excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink

This holds true in nearly every aspect of life: the conscious self is often unaware of the dynamics and changes that occur within us and the world. When forced to describe or explain things we are unaware of, the mind fabricates explanations and memories. Our minds naturally create languages to organize different aspects of our reality, and these languages shape our understanding of reality. As we delve deeper, the fragmentation between ourselves and the external world fades away.

The process of constructing a model of reality begins from the moment we come into existence. Through a combination of our inherent structure and our interaction with the environment, we develop complex and diverse languages. These languages assist us in organizing, comprehending, and expressing various aspects of our reality.

As Plato stated in the Allegory of the Cave, our perceptions are actually shadows of reality. We create models of reality based on the patterns we observe in these shadows. It is not always evident that facts about the true nature of reality will remain inaccessible, and the pursuit of an eternal and unchanging truth may prove futile. We have an involuntary tendency to create a theory of everything in our minds as we progress through time. We often find connections between things, even when such connections may not actually exist. Nevertheless, the feeling of interconnectedness persists.

As our minds become entangled with the elements of reality that we experience, we learn to organize these elements into patterns and think in more general terms. It appears that there are successive layers of reality, with each layer containing more general and comprehensive patterns than the previous ones. Discovering these patterns is a way of penetrating the structure of reality. This deep desire to isolate, preserve, and comprehend parts of the reality we experience, so that we can grasp and manipulate them, is what I believe to be inherently human.