The Science: How Habit Beats Novelty

Because people are creatures of habit, they are blind to novelty. Our brains use heuristics and experience to decide what something is, often skipping over unexpected or novel aspects of a scene. The neuroscientist Moshe Bar posits that the brain "is continuously busy generating predictions that approximate the relevant future." He says, "We think that when we look at something, the brain asks, What is this? But really it asks, What is this like?" That is, we are matching input from the world to things we have encountered before. More here