[Lowfer] XNS, XGJ et al

[Bill de Carle]

When expected information is missing or marginal the mind can subconsciously dub it in.  It seems to use something like a 
maximum-likelihood decoder, drawing on a person's past experience.  Have  you ever turned on a radio during a newscast and it 
comes up in the middle of a word?  Sometimes you will actually "hear" the whole word and it makes perfect sense, but later you 
find out it must have been something else!  This can happen when skimming over a newspaper headline - you might "see" a complete
word in your mind (the missing portion even appearing in the same type font) but it later turns out to have been  a different 
word.  If you're on the lookout for this phenomenon you'll spot it in many situations.  Possibly the same mechanism is at work 
when we are asleep and dreaming: the content has to come from somewhere.

Perception is based largely on expectation.

Bill VE2IQ

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John Andrews <w1tag at charter.net> wrote:
(03/11/2010 09:41)

> Chris,
> 
> Guilty, there! It's amazing how fading can make you create QRSS signals 
> out of dead carriers. That's the trouble with us humans -- we keep 
> trying to imagine patterns where none may exist. And the keyboard modes, 
> particularly WOLF, are not safe, either.