The Cause of Conflation

I just realized that conflation is caused by the brain principle "fire together, wire together."

If two events are almost always associated, they will be wired together, so that if you think of one you'll always think of the other.

What happens next is that we confuse association with logical identity, because we find we cannot conceive of the first concept without automatically conceiving the second concept - you cannot voluntarily switch your wiring on and off.