Not A Real Writer Podcast Episode 2 – Notes from inside the Matrix
Hi, this is Not a Real Writer, the podcast where I talk about fiction writing and the imposter syndrome that comes along with writing fiction. I’m your host, Melody Taylor, and I’m not a real writer.
Let’s talk about The Matrix, because why the hell not. There is a TON to unpack here. I’ll definitely be talking about it again, from a lot of different aspects. Today, let’s talk about one of my favorite topics in this movie, your perception of reality. And mine.
I’ve done a couple of deep-dives into plot analysis with this movie, which I will share later, but it also serves as an awesome metaphor for how our brains actually work. Plus that sci-fi philosophy shit is right up my alley. Let’s start with the metaphor of being trapped in the Matrix, why don’t we?
For me, being a fiction novelist comes with a deep curiosity about humans and how our psyches works. I think being really curious about human behavior is hugely important to writing believable characters. If you want to write fiction, getting a good therapist is a great idea. Or at least, read a bunch of self-help and psych books. Understanding yourself and how your own brain works is a fantastic step towards understanding others, which is a fantastic step towards writing realistic characters.
The other thing that’s super helpful is studying up on animal behavior and training techniques. One of the best thing I ever learned about humans was how to train dogs. We will go into that more later. But back to being inside the Matrix and writing.
A thing that bothers me a bunch is reading a book or another author’s manuscript and seeing the characters behaving in ways that make no sense whatsoever. In one workshop I attended, we read a piece where the main character’s mother invited his ex over for tea when she knew he’d be arriving, then rudely told the ex to get the fuck out when the MC got there and said he didn’t want to see her, on top of the butler telling her off in a lengthy speech before she left. That kind of writing tells me that the writer doesn’t actually understand human behavior or the society we – or their characters – live in.
So your brain. It’s a curious creature. We think that we’re observing the world in an accurate, non-biased way. We think we are seeing what’s there, hearing what’s there, and know what’s real and what’s not.
We absolutely are not and do not. Our brains are making up 100% of the world around us. A la The Matrix – no machines or computers required.
Don’t believe me? Allow me to present my case.
Exhibit 1: You don’t see your nose. Your nose is ALWAYS in your line of sight, yet you don’t see it unless you specifically look for it. It’s not that your eyes don’t see it. They do. It’s that your brain edits it out as unnecessary information. Your brain has the power to delete things that your eyes are literally looking at. Humans also have a blind spot at about a 45 degree angle from straight ahead. If you hold your left thumb straight up in front of you, focus your eyes on the wall behind it, and slowly move your thumb to the left, there will be a little spot where it disappears. You actually CAN’T SEE THERE. Your brain fills in what it thinks should be there from the information it gathers while you look around, so you don’t have a blank spot in your vision. Your brain has the power to add things into your view that you can’t actually see. Oh, and you know what else? If you do the thumb thing too many times, it will STOP DISAPPEARING. Think about that for a second.
Exhibit 2: Pareidolia. Which is the name for seeing human faces in inanimate objects. They’re not faces, yet we can’t help but see them that way. Because your brain sees human faces as important, and thinks that it should be on the lookout for them. So it sees them because it expects to. Your brain has the power to tell you one thing is actually something else.
Exhibit 3: When random sounds hit a certain frequency or cadence, we hear human voices and words. There’s a word for the effect, but Google isn’t being helpful at the moment and the book I learned the word from is miles from where I am right now. I believe it was “The Language Instinct” by Stephen Pinker. Same as for faces, your brain is actively listening for human voices, and will decide that’s what it hears if random sounds come close to having the right tone. Once you hear human voices, you will not be able to unhear them. Your brain has the power to tell you that you hear things that are not real.
Exhibit 4: The woman in the gorilla suit. I learned about this one in Temple Grandin’s “Animals Makes Us Human.” When researchers showed volunteers a video of two teams playing basketball and asked the volunteers to count how many shots the red team misses, the volunteers got so absorbed in their task that they did not notice the woman in the gorilla suit who walks onto the court, waves her arms at the camera, and walks off. Their brains edited her out because that wasn’t what they were looking for. Your brain has the power to ignore things – really obvious things! So much more than you think it can! – that it doesn’t think are important.
Our brains are electrified heaps of Jell-O that are programmed to look for social cues, repeating patterns, other humans, danger, and information that will help keep us alive, including how to keep other humans from rejecting us because in tribal times rejection would mean death. They are also programmed to have confidence in their own functioning, because if they’re wrong about a lot, they can’t trust themselves to do their job effectively – namely, keeping us alive in a dangerous world. So we believe what we tell ourselves, deeply and truly.
Color doesn’t exist, it’s your brain’s short-hand for different wavelengths of light — and only the ones your eyes have evolved to pick up, at that. But you don’t notice that you can’t see infrared or ultraviolet. You just don’t, and that’s your world. Sounds don’t exist, it’s your brain’s short-hand for different wavelengths of vibrations. Emotions are our instinctive reactions to things that happen based on our brain’s ideas about survival and social acceptance.
I remember being in grade school and a teacher telling the class that humans don’t have instincts anymore. Bullshit. What the hell are emotions? You see a pile of vomit and you feel disgust and want to get away from it, that’s to try and prevent you from getting sick too. Someone argues with you and you feel sad and want to make up with them so you don’t get kicked out of the tribe – or you get angry and want to make it their fault that you argued so the tribe rejects them and not you. And you might very well feel sad and want to make up with a person who was totally wrong and being horrible to you, or you might get angry and blame someone else who was in the right. Your brain doesn’t worry about things like facts and unbiased data – it goes with what it thinks is best for you in the moment based on what’s worked before. And it tells you that your emotions are justified. That’s what instincts are.
All this to say: Your whole world is in your head. All our worlds are. Your brain is making it up based on what it thinks it sees and what it thinks is important. All the people you think you know are characters your mind has made up based on what it thinks it sees. The thoughts and emotions you have aren’t correct or incorrect, they’re just what your brain thinks are correct in the moment — and that can change based on a lot of different factors, including what you tell yourself is true. You can’t know what anyone else is feeling or thinking with any true certainty, and they can’t really know what’s on your mind. I want you to really stop and appreciate that sentence. You can’t know what’s on other people’s minds, and they can’t know what’s on yours or anyone else’s. All you can do is shout into the void and hope their brain understands what you want to say, and hope you understand what their brain wants to say.
In short, we’re all trapped inside our own Matrices. But unlike a computer simulation, we’re inside our own brains and we can’t get out. And unlike the Matrix, it’s not one big simulation that we’re all in together — we’re all in our own private version that may overlap with others’ versions, but they never truly line up 100%. Also unlike the Matrix, where machines are using your brain to lull you into complacency so they can use your body for power, your brain is doing the best it can. It’s not always right, in fact it’s often wrong, but it’s trying. It doesn’t mean you ill, it just gets caught up in bad information sometimes – and then is programmed to insist that it’s right.
This realization has given me a lot of understanding of myself and other people. When other people have a bad opinion of me, it doesn’t actually mean anything about me, or have much to do with me. It just means their brain has been trained to dislike people like me. Or even that they recognize that they’ve done something wrong, and don’t want to take the blame for it and so pin it on someone around them; sometimes, me. Maybe I did something wrong, maybe not. If I think over my behavior and I’m genuinely happy with it, then the problem is theirs. I can’t make them change their mind about me, I can only make me happy and hope that some other people I like find me likeable, too. (This took a long time to get into the habit of!)
I’m going to go ahead and repeat that: When someone doesn’t like you, it doesn’t usually have much to do with you or anything you did. Their brain has been trained to not like something like you did or people like you, for whatever reason, or they know on a subconscious level that they are in the wrong and want to pin it somewhere else, and you happened to be there. People who are not self-aware and don’t ask themselves questions about their own behavior also often get mad at others for doing things that they themselves are ashamed of or don’t like about themselves. This doesn’t hold true for people who are good at examining their own behavior, but hoo boy does it hold true for people who don’t want to think about themselves or how they act. Lots of people say they’re self aware, but actually aren’t. Being self aware is hard, and brains don’t usually like it. They want to conserve calories and be correct.
Think over your own behavior, and be honest with yourself, like really, really honest; if you are happy with what you did and how you did it, then there is nothing more you can do. That is up to the other person to resolve in their own mind, and let’s be honest, they probably won’t. That’s not your fault, and it’s not your responsibility. Other people are responsible for their own emotions.
This does swing both ways. When I don’t like someone else, it doesn’t mean they’re bad or shouldn’t exist, it means my brain has a dislike of them for whatever reason it thinks makes sense. Sometimes I know what that is, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I can figure it out if I care enough to. But the bottom line is, they don’t exist to gain my approval. If I really don’t like them, and I know why and I’m good with it, I don’t waste time (anymore, this is another thing that took practice!) trying to make nice. I get on with my life and deal with them as much as I have to and as politely as I can, or not at all if I don’t have to. This has really helped break the habit of people pleasing! It’s also helped me get past being angry a lot – if someone really annoys me, it doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I have no obligation to like them, and they have every right to exist and be who they are, no matter what I think. When someone tries to hurt my feelings, it isn’t as sharp anymore. Mostly, if they’re trying to hurt someone around them, it means they don’t want to look at their own behavior so they’re trying to vilify someone so they can pin the problem elsewhere. It’s little to do with me at all. No need to get mad, just move on.
It also means that how I feel has everything to do with what I (and the society I live in) tell myself is appropriate to feel, and how other people feel is exactly the same. My feelings are my own responsibility, and other people’s feelings are theirs. Despite what we might think, no one “makes” us think or feel anything — we decide that all on our own. It’s a subconscious response, but much like breathing, it’s something we do without thinking until we start to think about it. And then we can change how we breathe – and we can decide to think differently.
I fully intend to talk about the concepts of thought-work, psychology, and life coaching on this podcast. I’m not a life coach or a therapist, but I’ve worked hard at understanding my own brain and why it believes I’m not a real writer. I don’t know about you, but it exploded my mind a little to realize that everything I experience in my life is all made up by my brain. It’s doing the best it can, but even really clean machines fuck up sometimes. And electrified Jell-O is not exactly what I would call a clean machine.
Thinking about these things instead of wallowing in emotional reactions has given me some good insight on not only my own behavior, but also other peoples’. It can definitely take a bit to get past the knee-jerk emotional response and into thinking, but it does eventually happen, and it does help.
Now, how does this useful tidbit figure into fiction writing? I’m so glad you asked!
This is some awesome insight into how your characters should behave.
Because while this information is super useful for helping to cope with my own and others’ behavior, it’s information that most people don’t have or think about. So understanding that my characters are running around with brains telling them things that are various states of true, and what the actual motivation of that brain is, I can set my imaginary people up to act more like how real people act. They’ll argue passionately about stupid stuff, they’ll refuse to hear things they don’t want to hear, they’ll refuse to see their own flaws until those flaws are shown to them in just the right way and not even notice they’re ignoring them or that they’re causing their own problems.
The things that brains are motivated by comes down to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Bottom most, physiological: stuff like breathing, eating, drinking, sleep. Next up, safety: health, employment, property, social and family stability. Third, love and belonging: friendship, family, intimacy. Fourth, self-esteem: confidence, achievement, respect of others, a need to be unique. And topmost, self-actualization: morality, creativity, purpose, and meaning.
Give us a character who is missing one of these things, and show us how they lost it and how they try to get those things, and you’ve got a story.
This is all super important, this is the stuff that brains want; however, both the writer and the human needs to remember two things: One, the brain wants the bottom things first, and will work its way up the pyramid as it secures things on the lower levels. Two, it will lie to its owner about things that stand in its way or what it needs to do to get those things. Brains are lazy, and they don’t like things like “taking responsibility for oneself and one’s actions and emotions” or “taking a better look at the strategy one is employing.” They do like things like, “It’s someone else’s fault,” or “I’m doing the best I can there is nothing else I can do.”
We evolved in a setting where calories were hard to get, and thinking takes a lot of calories. Brains don’t like to do hard thinking. We kind of have to make them, or see things just right so our brains can make the connections more easily. Brains also don’t like to think differently than society has taught them to – after all, that would risk the second and third level of Maslow’s hierarchy. If you disagree with what society has taught you to believe – like, maybe that you’re not a real writer – you might be rejected by the people around you. As I mentioned earlier, rejection by the tribe in African Savannah days meant death. Lone humans don’t do so well in the wild. So your brain digs in and says, “whatever the people around me believe and have told me, that’s TRUE.”
And that, my friends, is why I think learning to think for yourself is a radical and rebellious act.
Getting those ideas unstuck, for both yourself and your characters, is difficult work. That’s why you’re writing a whole book about it. Right? And that’s what Neo has to overcome in the movie, too – his brain’s own stubborn refusal to believe in anything other than what he’s already been taught. To the point where when his reality literally changes, he can’t take advantage of it because his brain is so trained to believe he can’t.
I’m going to go ahead and pile one more idea on top of all this, because what the hell.
You need to remember that your characters have their own separate motivations and understandings of their world, but you also need to remember your reader. What does your reader understand in their world? What are they missing? Why are they reading your story? What can you show them that they need to follow along and get what you’re trying to say? Remembering that your reader does not live in your head and has their own ideas about the world will help you decide what kinds of scenes to include and exclude, and what kinds of characters and situations will get your message across to the sort of reader you’re trying to reach.
Once upon a time, I learned that a certain species of starfish will not move away from harm unless the harm comes from a certain species of starfish-eating anemone. That species of starfish has no predators or enemies in nature besides that species of anemone. When researchers cut pieces of it off, or burned it or electrified it, the starfish would not flinch away at all. It simply could not detect anything in its environment that would harm it. Its brain, such as a starfish has, had no concept of “danger” aside from that particular anemone.
When I read that, it made me wonder what we humans miss, simply because we lack the senses to take certain things in.
Turns out, it has less to do with the senses, and more to do with the interpreting machine that takes in the information from our senses.
Also turns out, we miss a helluva lot.
That was a deep topic to get into, and more about some of the philosophical concepts explored by The Matrix than nuts and bolts, although I hoped the brain talk helped you makes sense of not only your own brain, but also the brains of your characters.
Not only have I been in trauma therapy lately, I’ve also been listening to a coaching podcast called “Unfuck Your Brain,” and I’ve been having all sorts of little brain-explode-y moments where I realize not only something about myself and my own beliefs, but at the exact same time one of my characters and their beliefs and actions. It’s kind of delightful. I’ll most certainly be talking more about those as we go along.
I hope your brain explodes delightfully. Thanks for listening.
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