As the brain does not have direct contact with the world, but only an image of the world on the retina which is ambiguous, it has to call on the statistics of how it behaved in the past to understand how to behave in the future.
Prof David Reynolds, from the University of Cambridge and author of The American Occupation of Britain, says that personal contact with GIs quickly "penetrated beyond the movie image of glossy Americans into a discovery that they were human beings, warts and all".
Grossman noted that as recently as December 2010, a Time magazine article highlighted that the image that most Palestinians have of Israelis is shaped by their direct contact with soldiers.
And while I was well paid, I had become the very image of my most despised beings: a downtrodden commuter, avoiding eye-contact with the fellow-travellers, whose home town was a place to sleep rather than a community to which he could contribute.