In laboratories and in life, the human mind has long been trusted to read the world as it is — yet new research from Peking University reveals that our brains carry a quiet, systematic preference for the middle ground. Across eight behavioral experiments, participants consistently perceived simple patterns as more complex and complex patterns as simpler, always drifting toward a moderate structural complexity that exists more in the mind than in reality. This bias, traced through Bayesian modeling to the finite limits of human memory, is not a flaw so much as a feature — a cognitive economy th