Every now and then I see the mental blocks some people put up unconsciously, when they've preemptively decided they're going to disagree with new data.

Today someone mentally blocked out every identifying marker in a video I'd shared with them, so they could claim they didn't know who was in the interview.

But there was no *conscious* intent to their actions. Some deeper part blocked them from being able to recognize the interviewee clearly labelled all throughout.

Fascinating and disturbing.

Each of us is a bundle of habituated biochemical reactions that cannot see outside its own processing loop. We respond to new inputs based on past experiences - and every single one of us has a different mess of them.

As such, we often genuinely talk past one another - without meaning to, and without meaning to do each other harm. Some simply cannot grok much of anything that threatens a core belief.

It's honestly astonishing that we manage to communicate as well as we do at all, sometimes.