The mind is absolutely expert at constructing a whole scenario from partial data. In fact more than expert: This ability is a cornerstone of our humanity, a basic building block of our consciousness. It is precisely waht enables us to model the world as well as we do.
In other words take a pencil sketch of a person. It is really just marks on paper, but our clever brains 'see' a person. Or an impressionist painting, which can allow us to 'see' a richly textured scene. Or imagine a garbled or gappy phone conversation.
It is this same faculty that causes us to jump to conclusions on the basis of partial data. Something that is not always a good thing.
Anyone who has ever tried drawing from life will know that it is very difficult to train ourselves to see exactly what we see, and not 'add in' what we know is there: we find it hard to draw a foreshortened human limb without adding in the bits we can't actually see... because the mind knows it's there, so feels we must draw it. If we draw everything we end up with picasso-esque results. Well, it worked for Pablo but not for us if we are trying to draw realism from life.
In the Integrating the Elements chapter I will discuss how this impacts the way we deliver our lyrics. In the following article I will examine the issues about hearing what is actually there, not what we think we hear.