Here’s a weird realization I just had, and it makes a lot of sense while at the same time being a little freaky.
I’ve written before about how being a fiction novelist comes with a deep curiosity about humans and how our psyches works. (Or at least, if you want to write believable characters, it should!) If you want to write fiction, getting a good therapist is a great idea. Understanding yourself and how your own brain works is a fantastic step towards understanding others.
A thing that bothers me a ton is reading a book or another author’s manuscript, and seeing the characters behaving in ways that make no sense whatsoever. It just tells me that the writer doesn’t actually understand human behavior or the society we live in.
But I digress.
The human brain is 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.
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. 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 that you can’t actually see.
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.
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. 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.
Exhibit 4: The woman in the gorilla suit. When researchers show volunteers a video of two teams playing basketball and ask the volunteers to count how many shots the red team misses, the volunteers get so absorbed in their task that they do not notice the woman in the gorilla suit who walks onto the court, waves her arms at the camera, and walks off. Their brains edit her out because that’s not what they’re looking for.
Exhibit 5: Eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable. People who see crimes happen are terrible at noticing important details that could help catch the bad guy. They’re too focused on their own safety or emotions to actually notice anything useful. But they will swear that they remember things very particularly. Because their brains want to be accurate, so they decide that they are and insist that’s correct.
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 do their job effectively.
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 — including love and hate. And I think all of us have experienced the embarrassment of reacting badly to a social situation, or watching someone else respond badly to something they clearly don’t understand.
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 just 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, nor they you. 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 Matrixes. But unlike a computer simulation, we’re inside our own brains and we can’t get out. 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%. And unlike the Matrix, 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.
This 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. It just means their brain has been trained to dislike people like me. When I don’t like someone else, it doesn’t mean they’re bad or shouldn’t exist, it just means my brain has a dislike of theirs for whatever reason it thinks makes sense. Sometimes I know what that is, sometimes I don’t.
It also means that how I feel has everything to do with what I (and the world around me) 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 subconscious, but much like breathing, it’s something we do without thinking until we start to think about it and then we can decide to think differently.
I’m not going to go deep into the whole concept of thought-work, psychology, and life coaching principles here, this one blog post isn’t nearly big enough for all that. It just kind of exploded my brain 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.
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 the 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.
