As I was reading the pages from Blindspot, the examples being used seemed eerily familiar to me. I felt as though I had read the book before. In high school, I get through a two year time period where I read a couple nonfiction books on how the mind works. The pages from these books, or at least the examples they used, kept popping up everywhere, from the AP Language and Composition exam to lectures in college. Particularly, the first example used in the passage from Blindspot, the table example, is also used in Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan. Likewise, the various wordings of the car crash example is also used in Bounce by Matthew Syed. Many of the memory examples used in Blindspot had similar examples in both of these other books.
While I have continued to notice these examples being used in different contexts around me, I do not think that the way I perceive the world has changed much. I have not thought that I experience the same memory issues as shown with the “mindbugs.” I have not actively thought about the perceptions I make have just because my mind is unable to comprehend the entire picture. However, in seeing the examples and explanations pop up again, I think I should actually begin taking it to heart. In my daily life but also in my academic life. I should actively realize the mind fills in pieces of information when reading articles and, therefore, the information I remember may not be the information that was actually presented to me. Ultimately, I believe that I have experienced these arguments too many times to not see the merit behind them.
What makes things like mindbugs particularly terrifying is that almost by design we can’t tell when they’re happening to us, unless it’s pointed it out. As other posts have noted it’s worrisome how the justice system among other institutions treat live witnesses as ironclad pieces of evidence, despite there being many examples to suggest that not only are live witnesses not ironclad, they are often faulty and unreliable.