In psychology/neuroscience, many refer to this generally as heuristics. It’s astonishing how much the mind relies on these heuristics from aspects like language

In psychology/neuroscience, many refer to this generally as heuristics. It’s astonishing how much the mind relies on these heuristics from aspects like language (as you’ve pointed out) to visual perception. Many think the main purpose is to speed up processing tasks and require less “resources” so that cognitive load is freed up for other things. One of my favorite examples of this is how car drivers seem to fall into a sort of “auto-pilot” mode freeing up resources to think about random things like what you’re going to eat for dinner once you get home. I think the ELI5 way to look at it is pattern recognition and then using those patterns for not only prediction, much like ML models, but also in other things like physical actions, emotional response, etc. Many theorize it is that these heuristics are trained and the “path more taken” is the default. It’s when a stimulus doesn’t fit that path that the brain has to decide whether: 1. Is something wrong with this? 2. Is this a new path I need to start paving to speed up future processing? Whether or not that second choice is made is dependent on lots of things co-processing at the time: Emotion, attention, attitude, etc. How much that path is paved is also dependent on those things. This idea is fundamental to areas of study like symbolic systems at Stanford [1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Systems