Bring fresh perspectives

The mind is designed to work off of predictions that it makes from available information.  It will receive a certain amount of stimuli and project how to fill out the rest of the information that is going to be received.  When the information is received, the mind converts that information into what is expected whether or not that information matches what is actual.  Steven Pinker aptly demonstrates this in his book How the Mind Works by talking about how the eye takes in stimuli for the brain to convert to the right colors and shapes.  The brain will analyze a more or less checkerboard scan of the stimuli and interpret what has been seen based on a projection of what was seen rather than what was actually seen.  That's why people have wrecks sometimes.  They look in a certain direction not expecting to see anything.  A car is coming, but since the brain didn't expect to see it, it tells the interpreter that nothing is coming.  A wreck occurs.

Language operates in much the same fashion.  People use words in predictable pattern sets much of the time.  So, people become accustomed to hearing certain sets of words together.  When a word out of the norm is used, many times people fill in the out of norm word with the word they were expecting.  If the word is too different from what the original speaker said, the original speaker will correct the listener's word, and an argument ensues on what word was used.  This happens a great number of times between people who have been friends a long time or who have been married or together a long time.

I have a high appreciation of those who bring fresh perspectives of life to me.  They fill in life in such a different way than the way I have come to expect life to happen.  We all have a habit of seeing life like we want it and predict it to be.  Different perspectives are needed to jolt us into a new way of seeing things sometimes.  I relish the moments of being in the company of people who offer that different perspective to me.  They stretch me and make my life so much more enriched than it would otherwise have been.