What's up with those illusions on the internet where you can hear the same sound one of two different ways, depending on the word that you're looking at?

And why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face to you? How can you have full rich visual experience with your

eyes closed? And when you want to cross a street and you hit that crosswalk button, are some of those

buttons fake and they don't actually do anything? And why are there some pictures that you can only

see once you're told what you're looking at?

And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why we perceive the world in the ways that we do.

Today's episode is about expectations and what that has to do with perception.

Unless you were living in outer space or off the grid in 2015, your life was touched by a very tiny, specific event that happened on a small island in Scotland.

Two young people were going to get married there.

And a week before the wedding,

the mother of the bride was shopping around

for what she was going to wear.

So she finds some outfits at a store down in Chester, England, that she thinks will look nice.

And while she's making the decision, she snaps pictures of each of them and she buys one of them.

So she's driving home afterwards, and she texts the pictures of the three

outfits to her daughter. And she tells her that she had bought the third one. And no one could

have ever guessed that this particular piece of clothing that she sent a picture of, this one-piece

garment, is about to become the most

famous outfit that ever existed in the history of humankind, because the daughter

writes back to clarify which outfit the mother had bought. And she texts, oh, the white and gold

...