In the process of teaching my students critical thinking skills, I tested their recollection of something they see five days a week: the terraform you see below. People unconsciously remember things as being straighter, more balanced, and otherwise more predictable than they really are.
I asked my students to make a simple drawing of the terraform in the parking lot. Almost all of them drew the globe as larger than it really was, and they positioned it in the center of the fountain. When I drew a diagram of it on the whiteboard, they refused to believe that the globe was positioned off center in the fountain. They were amazed when I led them to the balcony and let them look at it.
I also asked them to tell me the English name of this educational institution. Just as the terraform is the first thing they see upon entering the main part of the campus each day, the name of the institution is on the building in front of them.
Most of them incorrectly said that the name on the building was "Hsing Wu College;" the rest said they didn't know. It's a curious fact of human psychology that the more you see something, the less you notice it; until you finally forget the very thing that had drawn your attention the first time you had seen it. The name of the institution is on the building below: Hsing Wu Institute of Technology.
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