I did not hear you is a lie #deeplearning

Yesterday I said to my daughter "I'm sorry I did not hear you. What doesn't she like?" Based on my reading of How to Create a Mind by R. Kurzweil, I now understand what was really going on in my mind.

Background:
My daughter and I were talking about her friend Eva. We talked about their friendship. We were in the car listening to Pandora. Emily was looking at the radio display when she said, "Eva does not like this band anymore."  I was driving so I did not see where she was looking. When she said that I just could not understand what she said that Eva didn't like. I understood the "Eva does not like" and the "anymore".  But the middle was lost to me. Naturally I said "I'm sorry I did not hear you. What doesn't she like?"

Then it hit me. I heard the first and last words just fine. There was nothing to interfere with me hearing the middle section but my mind. We were talking about their friendship so I thought she said her but that did not fit the rest of the conversation so I stopped the conversation.

Your mind stores information in patterns. One of it's greatest abilities is to predict those patterns. This seems up processing and selectively activates pathways of hierarchical patterns that may related to the conversation. We teach predicting skills as part of reading comprehension because good readers can get ahead of the story by predicting so they can process the meaning of the story.

You, the reader, had no problem making sense of her comment because I included where she was looking. I was driving so when she made that statement, I did not see where she was looking. It was not that I did not hear her. It was that what she said did not match any of my predictions. Worst then that, for my mind, it was a band I had never heard of so it did not match any of my patterns. So I just simply did not understand.

Kurzweil states that our mind is always predicting. Our predictions are based on our experiences. Experiences are the bases for perceptions. Perceptions influence how we perceive the world around us.

It's not that I could not hear her. It is that my predictions did not match what she said in anyway. Nor did what she say match any know patterns in my mind. My mind hear that as a garbled mess because it did not match my understanding. It was a moment of insight for me into how our mind works based on my reading from How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. I highly recommend it.