Mind Patterns
A characteristic quality of Mind Patterns is the disposition for quick formation but a high resistance to change. Once an image has formed, once a Mind Pattern or set of expectations concerning the phenomenon being observed has developed it continues to influence future perceptions of that phenomenon.
New information gets assimilated into existing images and the deeper the commitment to an established view and the more ambiguous the information is, the tendency to assimilate new data into these pre-existing images increases. This also explains why gradual, slow change often goes unnoticed, that a fresh perspective is useful and why past experience can be a handicap. Once events have been perceived in a specific way, there is a natural resistance to other perspectives. To take a familiar body of data and reorganize it visually or mentally to perceive it from a different perspective is a difficult mental feat that intelligence and counter-intelligence analysts are required to do. In order to understand interactions, analysts must understand the situation as it appears to each of the opposing forces, and shift back and forth from one perspective to the other as they try to understand how each side interprets an ongoing series of interactions.
For Intelligence Analysts to achieve objective analysis by avoiding preconceptions would seem self-delusional. A move toward objectivity is only accomplished by identifying basic assumptions and reasoning as clearly and transparently as possible. Senior Counterintelligence experts warn of a fall into the nether world of professional CI: the school of doublethink, the nothing-is-what-it-seems syndrome, or the wilderness of mirrors. Stating that it is hard to immerse oneself daily in the arcane and twisted world of CI without eventually falling prey to creeping paranoia, distortion, warping, and overzealousness in one?s thinking.