The mechanism of “making up one’s mind too fast due to overload panic” and how to avoid this

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
September 4, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 7

Built into each human being before birth is an information- processing program whose apparent purpose is to make us need to understand our external and internal experiences. It works as follows: certain experiences (or “perceptions” or “percepts” – these words are all used interchangeably) trigger a feeling of dissonance in the mind; you pay closer attention to and think about these until you have a feeling of having absorbed their information, at which point the feeling of dissonance goes away, and we say that you have achieved closure.

Hasty closure can be defined as those instances in which it would have been useful for us to think further before closure.

Not all percepts trigger dissonance, but there are too many percepts available relative to our current capacity. Thus, most external and internal percepts are automatically screened out by a process of instant closure which avoids dissonance entirely.  For such percepts, we are not even given the opportunity to decide how much thought they merit; they do not reach our conscious attention and, therefore, receive no conscious thought.

Obviously, whenever we achieve instant closure by not even noticing a percept that contains valuable information for us, this is also an instance of hasty closure.

Thus, there are two types of hasty closure:

Type A: Instances in which we notice an object or a thought, think about it, reach our conclusions, and put it out of our minds too hastily.

Type B: Instances in which we do not even notice an object or a thought which contains useful information for us.

The types of percepts that will tend to be screened out most frequently by this second type of hasty closure will be percepts on which we have achieved closure in the past.

Thus, as we experience more and more different types of percepts, fewer and fewer percepts will trigger dissonance; we will stop looking at things we have seen before, and we will stop thinking about things we have reached conclusions about before. In this respect, the mind acts as if there is never any need to reopen old issues, although relevant new information may now be present in memory with which to look at old issues from new angles.

Eventually, we end up looking only at a narrow range of percepts that are relevant to our interests; this tends to block potential change or expansion of our interests.

Know that percepts that do not trigger dissonance and which therefore yield instant closure, do so as follows: Images of things we have seen before are stored in memory. When we are about to see something, our minds automatically search our memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between seeing something and our minds having already seen it). If our mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that we do not ever see the new object but are merely dimly aware that a familiar type of object is there.  Dissonance is not triggered, and this allows our attention freedom to concentrate on remaining percepts for which our minds have not found a suitable match.

As a result, we mostly do not perceive our environment. Instead, we perceive mostly what we expect to perceive, i.e., we usually see our mind’s prediction. Since most objects have more relevant detail than we have ever noticed, this process robs us of the opportunity to add detail to our image of most objects.

In some cases, the mental projection that we see is significantly different from the reality we do not see.

Example:

You are in a hurry. You glance at a book title. You glance away quickly. A moment later, you think, “ ‘Fellow’s Folly’ is the name of that book, the same as a song I know; the author must also know that song.” You glance back at the book title and read it carefully: “Free Four.”

What has happened is that your visual system was scanning for relevant clues since time did not permit a larger sampling of visual observations from each scanning sector. It picked out the two words starting with an F. After you looked away, your mind experimented with alternate predictions, based upon what you had in your “F___  F___” file drawer, i.e., what memories you had of word pairs with initial F’s on each word. It then verbalized to you what seemed to it to be an interesting prediction.

You looked back to test the prediction and found that it had been wrong.

Another entity in your place might not have looked back to test the prediction because, as a result of even less attention to head action, that other entity would think that it saw “Fellow’s Folly” and would have accepted the supposition that the book’s author named the book after the song as fact.

In this way, most entities “see the prediction” and not the bulk of the reality around them, in a continuous stream of such incidents as described above.

Society increases the tendency towards hasty closure by creating time pressures, communicating expectations, causing negative emotion, encouraging black-and-white positions, and valuing sophistication.

Creating time pressures
To some extent, we have been programmed by the expectations of others.  Most of our actions have been expected of us, and we have engaged in some of them for this reason alone.

At birth, we encountered an organized group of others who taught us that we had been created to fill a slot in their organization (our current society). During our most receptive early period, we probably met no one outside this organization. Thus, we may now spend most of our time working for this organization.

Under such conditions, our capacity for attention to matters not strictly organizational is severely reduced. Our closure goal is intensified; we cannot tolerate dissonance that distracts us from the organization’s tasks. If we are also trying to spend time on non-organizational goals, we may also regard dissonance as distracting us from these latter goals.

Thus, we will strive too hard for closure and achieve it too hastily on many occasions. This is the result of the organization’s infringement on our time.

Love to all,