As long as you’re presented with challenges from an angle you had not pre-considered and you cannot put into any of the categories you’ve built, an opportunity will present itself to either change your model, the aim in this exercise, or to just dismiss the new piece of information.

The older you get, the larger the number of categories that are available to you. The more categories you have, the more likely it is that one fits the input well enough such that it doesn’t look like you need to think about this categorization, even if the world has changed such that your categories are no longer good.

In the case where no good interpretation of the input is obvious, where you do need conscious thought, whatever you come up with is composed of what you have learned before. If what you have learned before offers bad parts, i.e., favors empirically unlikely interpretations, you’re out of luck. This epistemic disadvantage is part of how I explain to myself why wrong beliefs are so widespread.

“Have you read any books you thought might not reflect your own views on a matter in the last 12 months?” would be a decent starting point, I think (of course, the answer Yes would be a good thing, even if given in subsequent years for this specific question). The point, after all, is to keep an open mind, not to switch one’s mindset at every whim (even if that’s still my current modus operandi at this point, I cannot actually recommend it).

As to “If your model determines what you perceive — the input to your conscious processing mechanism, so to speak — then the option to ignore or change it may not be available.”:

I dare say that no such mental model of the world is ever complete enough to fully assess any new input. As long as you’re presented with challenges from an angle you had not pre-considered and you cannot put into any of the categories you’ve built, an opportunity will present itself to either change your model, the aim in this exercise, or to just dismiss the new piece of information.

This, if nothing else, should be a decision up to one’s conscious choice. And an easy one at that, if one wishes to keep up one’s self-image as an intelligent (or rather: intellectually honest) being. If you discard input, instead of just putting it in the wrong category, you’ve truly outlived your own purpose of a scientist. Thankfully, or hopefully, at least in academia, there should always be enough peers around to call out such ignorance.

Testing is a good idea, but it’s more easy to come up with joke tests than with actual ones. Testing for accurate inferences and good belief updates takes time if you want to disentangle it from things like world knowledge and speed of thought.

The danger of course is, that in the process of updating your beliefs, you might stumble upon the thought that leaning back and working with what you have might actually be a good idea and never get over it. The update to end all updates so to speak.

Maybe one could invent a yearly test: If you answer the same as last year, you loose.

Imagine nearing 50 and still feeling every day like the world is new, confusing and exciting. If you never reach a comfort zone, albeit one that might be a deception, you’ll live your whole life in fight or flight – which seriously impairs your ability to go out and do some of the things our genes and wiring tell you are important. Stargazing is fine, but at some point you’d better also gaze into the eyes of someone else and decide to send some rough copies of yourself into the world.

The important factor is that there must be a generation coming after the one that’s starting to encrust in its mindset. And thankfully, teenagers have this distinct appetite for rebellion which only gains in strength the more static and boring all those old people are. So while they’re growing blind, they’re opening the eyes of their children, whether they realize it or not.

Considering that this whole process appears to have gone on for thousands of years now, might it just be a very well working model from an evolutionary point of view?

First, consciously overriding default models gets harder (or less likely) with age. It may be the case that when there is no strong prior on one model, it’s easier to switch interpretations compared to the case where you have a strong prior based on lots of experience showing that this is the model likely to offer good explanations. Or it may be that, when we’re young, we just don’t have as many complex concepts and that we are therefore more likely to combine more basic concepts, maybe concepts “closer to perception”, more forced to look at what’s actually there.

Second, the unconscious updating mechanism slows down with age. The way I imagine this is that, when we sleep (dream?), our brains build new abstractions and restructure our concepts such that they better match our experiential data. This, I’d suggest, decreases with age — the brains of the elderly don’t build as many new concepts and they don’t restructure their model of the world as much as young brains do. Older people also seem to sleep less & less well, but here I don’t know where to draw the causal arrows, if any.

Of course, this is speculative and I wouldn’t bet much money on any of the two hypotheses, much less on any particular explanation.

What you see has always been an interpretation imposed on the data your eyes provide, but now your interpretation mechanism is tuned to a world from 30 years ago.

What kind of misinterpreted information do you have in mind when thinking about elderly people?

I would consider this a general problem, not just one of the elderly. When reading an article, for example, my brain quickly creates a model of what the author might had in mind. On reading further and encountering of contradicting information, it is often only with conscious effort that I start to revise my now highly improbable model instead of looking for the error that would allow me to keep it.

Even worse, the expectations of my brain may be so strong that I see what I expect to see, hear what I expect to hear – without even recognizing the contradiction. Like you said, there is a strong dependence of our perception on the model we already have in our mind. Yet I think it is possible to weaken this dependence by constantly staying aware of the problem and giving ones current model less weight.

And one decision could be to refuse the entire model of something and start over building it.

If your model determines what you perceive — the input to your conscious processing mechanism, so to speak — then the option to ignore or change it may not be available.