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gloudon's picture

does the brain fill in reality... or what it wants?

 This is in response to Emily's comment about falsely accused convicts... I'm not sure whether I read this, or saw it on TV somewhere... however, there was a women who had be raped many years prior, and she had to identify her attacker in a line up.  She picked a man, and he was accused, and spent over ten years in prison for this crime.  It ended up that he didn't commit the crime, and was found innocent by DNA testing (i'm not sure what took them so long to do a DNA test).  However, when the women saw the man again, she was sure that he was the attacker even though he was proven innocent.  To me, this seems like a case where the woman was so insistent upon finding her attacker, that her brain manipulated his face too look like the falsely accused man in the line up.  In this case, the connection between this woman's brain and her eyes sent a man to jail for over a decade.  This case was dealt with by the law, but how many other things are there that don't end up in court where disagreements arise because peoples' brains perceive what they see differently. 

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