They have a nasty habit of back-rationalizing what they think they heard or saw to create a coherent narrative that they can better understand, rather than keeping to the specifics of what actually happened.
I actually experienced this personally a few months ago. I witnessed a car crash when I was sitting at a red light. The only thing I was sure of was that a pickup t-boned a sedan (everyone ended up being okay), and when I glanced up at the light a few seconds later, my light was green. As little as 30 minutes later, I had constructed a whole narrative in my head of what had happened based on shit I couldn't have known at the time. Luckily, I caught myself.
It's a real problem with the human mind. It's not necessarily true that we're good at just pattern recognition. It's that our brain thinks in narratives, no matter what the facts are. We just have to put things in narratives, or they become very difficult to comprehend or understand. If we don't have evidence for a narrative, we start inserting things that sound like it makes sense, and then we see the narrative as fact.
I actually experienced this personally a few months ago. I witnessed a car crash when I was sitting at a red light. The only thing I was sure of was that a pickup t-boned a sedan (everyone ended up being okay), and when I glanced up at the light a few seconds later, my light was green. As little as 30 minutes later, I had constructed a whole narrative in my head of what had happened based on shit I couldn't have known at the time. Luckily, I caught myself.
It's a real problem with the human mind. It's not necessarily true that we're good at just pattern recognition. It's that our brain thinks in narratives, no matter what the facts are. We just have to put things in narratives, or they become very difficult to comprehend or understand. If we don't have evidence for a narrative, we start inserting things that sound like it makes sense, and then we see the narrative as fact.
You kinda have to be trained to not do that.
Having been accused of this before, the Elders of Zion is a book, rather than people.