Subconscious Editing

It's funny the way the human brain works, isn't it? I mean, quite apart from the fact it appears to work on electricity (which is quite frankly ridiculous if you ask me...), it can do some pretty bizarre stuff at times.

Take, for instance, the way that it can recognise not only patterns, but also tiny incongruities in them. The patterns don't have to be numerical sequences or geometrical shapes, either. A pattern can be a block of text, written in a particular style. One word out of place - not misspelled, just unexpected - can leap right out of the page at you. 

The example which led me to blog about this is a recent experience with a word suddenly lodging itself in my mind. The word was 'blood'. Here I was, sitting at my desk with my email open on one screen and a fairly dry, technically worded document open on the other. Neither of which should contain the word 'blood'. At all. 

And yet... I scanned through the document a couple of times, and there it was, in the phrase 'the life blood of asset management planning'. In all of the text, in a place where it really had no reason to be, was my word. Of all the words on that page, my brain had honed in on 'blood'.

Why did this happen? And more importantly, are there wider implications here? I know that I have at least a partially photographic memory - I can remember numbers I've seen written down, such as license plates on cars. Not all the time, but way more than average. And I can remember visual patterns with surprising ease and accuracy. 

Could it be that as an extension of this is my brain scanned all of the words in the document and found this one out of place? Or was because it was so wrong in the context of the words written there that I couldn't help but spot it? Or was it just a fluke?

I don't have the answers. Sometimes I wish I'd done cognitive psychology, just to answer questions like this. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have liked to be like Derren Brown. Stupid man...