[goldmab]

We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago

I can't take this statement seriously. Have you ever even taken an intro cognition or perception class? Almost everything is about how minds typically work, and all of the findings are less than one hundred years old.

[bane]

Many years ago. Perhaps the field has changed or I had a lousy course. But most of it seemed to be about describing the edge cases where our brains produce false models or find wrong patterns in the world.

[goldmab]

Of course brains produce false models and find wrong patterns. Modeling and pattern-matching is what brains do. So they're going to get it wrong a lot.

The interesting thing isn't how funny it is that the mind screws up sometimes, it's knowing the actual mechanisms of perception, cognition, memory, behavior, etc. Edge cases and failures are only the beginning of understanding, because they hint at how things work.

For example, visual perception is heavily based on detecting edges. So there are a set of optical illusions where you fail to accurately perceive the colors or shades of different areas (like the chessboard illusion), because the relative shading of adjacent areas is more important for producing edges and shapes in your mind.