This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

When we look at the world around us, our minds are trained to fill in visual gaps to form a more complete mental picture.

So if you see a peak of a mountain in the distance,

chances are pretty good, there's like a whole mountain below it. Yeah and for the most

part that kind of mental extrapolation is really useful when we notice part of a thing out in the world

our brains automatically help us see the bigger picture. That's 99PIs owned. Kurt Colstead

and so before we launched the bigger episode for today, Kurt and I recently

encountered a small story that dovetails was something that we've covered before. It's about how our

imaginations, while trying to fill in those gaps sometimes leave us a stray.

They do and you know even with things that we think we visualize really well like for example

icebergs anywhere you look from like an inspirational poster to a kids illustration, we think we know what icebergs look like. They, you know, look like this little rounded hump on top and this sort of spike going into the water below,

sort of like a big ice cream cone.

Right.

I've definitely seen that before.

I mean, that's the whole expression, tip of the iceberg.

You see that little mound and you see that deep spike

and that's the whole point of the visual metaphor

and the metaphor metaphor.

And I've thought about that before and I've used it a lot myself,

but I never really considered it literally, like,

as in just seeing the tips of icebergs and what that really means until I saw this image

posted online by a glaciologist here just take a look.

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