Tuesday, December 5, 2023

A note on a recurring jigsaw puzzle misperception.

Like every time that I do a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, I sort out the edge pieces first, and then when I first do that and go to assemble them, I look at them and they don't seem to be very many, and I always find myself thinking stuff like, "Is that all of them?" and "Did I miss gathering some?" and "Are some missing?", although invariably when I go to assemble them, it really is all of them, or at most maybe like 1 or 2 weren't picked out from the non-edge pieces.

It's like some optical illusion, where the human mind is bad at estimating how many small pieces are necessary to line up in order to hem in and enclose some large space.

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