We live in a continuous reinterpretation of sensory input and memories

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 117.

Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) "does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best . . . mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body."

Everyone, to one degree or another, sees not the real world but the ever-changing state of the self in an ever-changing invention of the world. We live in a continuous reinterpretation of sensory input and memories, and they are contained in presets that can, at any given moment, light up neural networks in a shifting kaleidoscope of energy, which we come to think of as reality. It is all part of the dynamic dance of adaptation that accounts for our survival as an organism and the survival of the species.