For my teaching job, I frequently visit the nearby University of North Florida, and as I was glancing over a campus map earlier today, something stood out to me: “Wait… there’s an Olive Garden on campus? I mean, I knew they had some restaurants, but an Olive Garden? Really?” I inspected the map more carefully and realized, in my haste, I had misread the words “Ogier Gardens” (a one-acre, largely student-run organic garden) as “Olive Garden” (a chain restaurant where, for just $7.99, you can eat enough soup and breadsticks to irreparably damage your pancreas). I couldn’t help but laugh at my mistake and take comfort in the fact every human brain does this.

You see, our brains operate by creating shortcuts— i.e. by following the regular repetition of words, phrases, and events around us and using these to predict future patterns. Your ability to recognize patterns is teh raeson yuo can stlil undrestand this sentence, and it’s also the reason riddles provide amusement. “A plane crashes on the border between the US and Canada. Where should you bury the survivors?” The correct answer would be “Nowhere; you don’t bury survivors,” but our pattern-seeking brains tend to skip the last word and dive straight into the intricacies of international plane crash law. Unfortunately, there are also less fun examples of our brains’ reliance on shortcuts.

I’m sure you’ve seen the picture floating around the internet and the front pages of newspapers: a Native American elder holding a ceremonial hand drum and looking into the face of a white Catholic teenager sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat. The picture has been all over news and social media for almost a week now following the confrontation of protesting groups at the Lincoln Memorial. Various videos have shown different angles featuring other protestors, and countless people on the scene have been interviewed by major outlets to better understand the context. The image is striking, but what I find even more impressive are the ways different commentators instinctively filled in the gaps:

“The kid in the MAGA hat is smirking and looking down at the Native American man. He and his friends are clearly making fun of him.” Notice how this person used physical positioning and facial expressions in the photo to compose the rest of the story.

“This boy and his friends are so young. They must not understand what’s happening, or there must be some other explanation. Also, where are their chaperones?!” This person relied on assumptions about age (perhaps even pulling in personal experiences with teenagers) to fill in the narrative.

“They’re wearing MAGA hats. It’s a hate symbol. End of story.” This person used experiences with a political symbol to make sense of the dynamics in the picture.

And then, of course, countless voices have expressed support or condemnation based on issues of race, privilege, and culture. As of this writing, the court of public opinion is still fairly conflicted, and pundits continue to debate exactly what is happening in the pictures and videos, but for so many of us, our brains have already used preexisting shortcuts to complete the narrative. “I already know the personalities of the people in the photos,” our brains tell us, “I already know their politics.” And it’s entirely possible our assumptions are correct, but we should still take note: our biases got there before we did.

Curious to learn more about this controversial photo and our brains’ tendency to fill in the gaps of stories like it? Make sure to click some of the hyperlinks in this article. There’s a lot of food for thought.