The Constructed Reality: How Your Brain Creates Your World
The world you perceive is not a direct reflection of reality. Your brain actively constructs your experience, editing memories and creating a narrative that feels real. This raises the question: What is truly happening, and who controls our lives?
The Gap Between Reality and Perception
Vision: More Illusion Than Reality
Our vision, seemingly our primary source of information, is surprisingly limited. Only a small, thumbnail-sized area of our visual field is in sharp focus. The rest is filled in by our brain using a clever trick.
Saccades and Blindness
Each second, our eyes make 3-4 rapid, jerky movements called saccades. These movements last about 50 milliseconds and allow us to focus on different points, creating sharp images that our brain pieces together. During these saccades, our vision is suppressed to prevent motion blur, resulting in approximately two hours of blindness each day. Instead of seeing this blur, our brain fills in the gaps with its best guesses.
Time is an Illusion
Furthermore, we don't experience time accurately. Consider stirring milk into coffee: light, sound, and heat reach our senses at vastly different speeds. Our brain processes these inputs at different times, yet we perceive them as one simultaneous event. The "now" we experience is a selectively edited version of the past, processed and invented by the brain. Consciously, we experience the world 0.3 to 0.5 seconds after events occur.
Living in the Past, Future, or a Made-Up Future?
Our brain doesn't just edit the past; it also predicts the future to create our present experience.
Table Tennis Example
Imagine a table tennis pro facing a ball traveling at 25 meters per second. Light from the ball reaches the eye in nanoseconds, converting to electrical impulses that take 100 milliseconds to reach the brain. During this time, the ball travels 2.5 meters.
To react effectively, the brain can't rely on the past. It calculates the ball's future position based on its location, speed, and direction. This creates a fictional version of the ball, positioned where it should be by the time the information is processed.
Multiple Potential Futures
Even before the opponent hits the ball, the brain predicts the ball's trajectory based on the opponent's posture and past experiences. It prepares multiple potential responses, creating "ghost versions" of ourselves, each ready for a different scenario. Just before the opponent hits, the brain chooses the most likely future, deleting the other possibilities. The chosen movement is triggered even before we consciously see the ball. Our conscious experience is an invented future, a prediction based on past data.
Walking: A Constant Prediction
This predictive ability isn't limited to extreme sports; it's crucial for everyday activities like walking. The brain operates in three different time spheres at once: processing past sensory feedback, calculating the current state of the body, and predicting the future. Even before the foot touches the ground, the brain has already sent commands for the next step and calculated muscle patterns for the following two.
Reacting to Catastrophe
Even unexpected events like slipping on a banana peel are handled by pre-programmed responses. Different parts of the body are aware of different things at different times. The spinal cord often knows before the brain. The gyroscope in the ears detects a change in position, sending information to the brain stem and spinal cord, triggering emergency recovery patterns within 200 milliseconds. Arms shoot out, one leg stiffens, and core muscles contract, all before we're even consciously aware of the fall.
Are You Just a Prediction of Your Brain?
If our brain is constantly predicting and editing reality, what does this mean for our sense of self?
Emotions as Predictions
Our emotions, hunger levels, and energy levels are not simply reactions to our current state but also predictions of what we will need. Our brain releases hormones based on expected routines, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
When attending a party, our brain analyzes past experiences and expectations, predicting our emotional state before we even arrive. If it anticipates anxiety, it prepares the body accordingly, potentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Conscious Self: A Passenger, Not a Driver
While the brain handles most day-to-day decisions, we are not merely passengers. Our conscious self excels at long-term planning and abstract thinking. We are storytellers, shaping the narrative of our lives for ourselves and our brains. We have the capacity to see the big picture, edit existing predictions, and write new ones into the system. Even when we disagree with our brain, we ultimately hold the power to define who we are, creating a compelling narrative that we experience as undeniable reality. And, importantly, we can still enjoy ice cream, internet videos, and thinking about Pokémon.
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