← Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Is Reality Even Real? Your Brain Constructs the World You Experience
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The brain is constantly forming assumptions, and these are hardwired rules about what is going to happen, what it expects, how it should engage. And often these rules are not in alignment with how present reality is showing up. If this can happen with things like color, sound, physical, touch, pain, what then are we to do with our interpretation of emotion and what somebody means? Intention, motive. Do you see how gray this gets? Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? What if I told you that you've never actually directly experienced reality? It sounds absurd if you actually think about it. And if you're listening to this episode right now, maybe you are driving down the road, maybe you're working out, maybe you're folding laundry, which I certainly could be doing myself right now. Walking your dog. Maybe you are sitting, sipping a cup of coffee, which I have right here with some nicely frothed almond milk. Mm. Delicious. This room around you and everything that you're interacting with feels real. The sounds feel real. The smells feel real. Your body feels real. Everything feels immediate, tangible, and obvious. Yet one of the absolute strangest discoveries in neuroscience is that your brain has never directly touched the outside world. Your brain has never actually seen a sunset. It's never actually heard a song. It's never actually even felt the warmth of a person's hand. Yet everything you've ever experienced has arrived as information in the form of light, vibration, pressure, chemistry, temperature, and countless other forms of sensory data that are converted into electrical signals that are delivered to your brain sitting inside the complete darkness of your skull. Somehow, for those signals, your brain creates an experience that feels so seamless and convincing that it feels like reality itself. The question that I want to explore on part one of today's episode is not whether reality exists. The question is how reality becomes experience. How does a biological organism transform wavelengths into something that we call color? How do we turn vibrations into sound, pressure into touch, or information into some sort of broader meaning? How does the brain take billions of pieces of incoming data and construct the coherent world you move through every single day? The answer lies in the fields of physics, neuroscience, consciousness, philosophy, spirituality, and most importantly, a much deeper understanding of ourselves. The way that we experience reality influences every single relationship that we have. It also influences every emotion that we feel, our memories that we carry, and every conclusion we eventually come to about the world around us. The world that you experience is nothing more than A translation. The chair feels solid. The floor beneath your feet, of course, feels solid. I would hope, unless you're dripping. The walls around you feel solid. The world presents itself as stable, tangible and dependable. Most of us move through life without questioning this experience because it feels so obvious. And going back to our episode on Medicine Journeys and Weed a few weeks ago, those of you who have dabbled with those substances perhaps have started to question how tangible reality is. If you've ever done psilocybin mushrooms, you know pretty quickly the world that you think exists around you morphs pretty quickly. I had an experience when I was maybe 21 or so, and I was, I did psilocybin mushrooms in Waipio Valley in Hawaii. And I'm. I mean, I don't know if this is going to be surprising to you, but I've had to do a lot of outdoor things as a child and I went to a boarding school in high school where we had to do a lot of outdoor things. So I've been forced into it. But I'm not like an outdoor girly. I don't like camping, I don't really like being dirty like that, and I really don't like creepy crawly bugs. So the idea of what I'm about to tell you, it has everything to do with the distinction between I was the girl who in Hawaii would like, obsess over checking the my sheets every single night because I didn't want a centipede to crawl into my bed because I was that icked by centipedes. So then fast forward, now I'm in Waipio Valley, I do psilocybin mushrooms. The whole world around me transformed into this sort of magical fairy kingdom. And I spent the whole night laying on a log and laying on the dirt and feeling like I was in this kingdom, surely with like centipedes and all kinds of creepy, crawly, crazy things all around me. But my perception of reality shifted so much that I wasn't afraid of it because it didn't appear the way it would have appeared to me sober. Those of you who have had an experience like that, arguably when you come out of that state of neuroplasticity and you have to reorient back to three dimensional reality, you have a, there's a bit of a spark that there's something else going on in our world that can't necessarily be explained by the natural sciences. And for this reason, for what it's worth, I know I've spent a lot of the, the last few weeks perhaps being critical of Hallucinogens and anything that gets you out of being sober of mind. And a lot of that comes from my spiritual maturity and my understanding of why it's so critical to be of sober mind. But as I mentioned on the episode about the problem with medicine journeys, it also has a lot to do with people, certain types of people being predisposed toward harm with the introduction of substances because it's already challenging for them to find or keep that tether to three dimensional reality. And the incidence of a psychotic incident becomes a lot higher in cases like those. But stepping away from the critique of this, I think where I'm going is when people have had these experiences, I think part of the reason there's so much allure and people can have some profound shifts from these things is because you know yourself and you know how you would naturally exist in an environment like I've described with Ypo Valley. If I were myself and sober of mind, I would be like staring at the ground, tiptoeing around to make sure I don't step on a centipede. Now introduce some psilocybin mushrooms and I'm like rolling around on the ground, feeling like I'm safe and like enveloped in nature. These two things are not the same. So when you come out of that state and you're equally aware of both of them, feel, feeling real, you're able to start to potentially take a new leap that maybe there is something else to our world that doesn't feel so concrete. Let's talk about atoms for a second, because I think atoms are something that we all hear about in school. We have to learn about them, probably starting middle school and then depending on what classes you take later, maybe you get a little bit more advanced with that. Atoms are primarily composed of empty space. If an atom were actually enlarged to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would occupy only a tiny portion of that space, while the rest would appear completely empty. Despite this, the chair that you are sitting on that you feel is solid continues to support your weight, yet it's made up of atoms. The floor remains beneath your feet. The wall remains impossible for you to walk through unless you have tapped into some sort of superpower that I have not. The experience of something being solid emerges from our interactions occurring at levels far below our conscious awareness. Electromagnetic forces, quantum rules, the organization of matter, all create the world that we experience as solid. The chair is real to you, the floor is real to you. The wall is real. Yet the sensation of something being solid is something actually created by your nervous System from your interaction. This introduces a theme that's going to appear again and again in this episode. Because reality exists independent of us, yet our experience of reality is generated through layers of our own individualized biological processing. The world arrives through a translation system. The deeper you look, the more fascinating our ability to translate actually becomes. One of the easiest ways for us to start this journey is to consider how your brain creates color. I want you to imagine a red apple sitting on a table, right? That experience feels simple. Maybe because of priming, you guys immediately started to think of a teacher. The apple appears red. The observation is immediate and obvious. Yet the simple moment is actually an extraordinary chain of events to get you from the place that you are. Looking at pixels on a table and constructing a red apple. Light from the environment strikes the surface of the apple. Certain wavelengths are then absorbed and reflected. Those reflected wavelengths travel into your eyes, and they stimulate specialized cells in the retina called cones. The cones convert light into electrical signals and send that information through the optic nerve toward your brain. The signals then pass through the thalamus, a structure often described as one of the brain's major relay stations. The thalamus helps organize sensory information, and it determines where it should go next. From there, activity spreads into your visual cortex, where the brain begins processing things like shape, depth, contrast, and pattern recognition. At this stage, your brain is still working with information rather than your actual experience. Memories begin contributing additional context. The hippocampus compares incoming information against previous experiences. Association starts to search for familiarity. Remember when I first said, I want you to think of a red apple? Many of you probably immediately thought of the association between a red apple on the desk and a teacher. Emotional systems evaluate significance and relevance. Countless neural networks contribute to each piece of constructing this puzzle. Then something remarkable happens. Your experience emerges, and the apple now appears in the shape of an apple. And it also appears red. The fascinating part is that redness does not exist inside of the apple itself. The apple is reflecting wavelengths. Your nervous system transforms those wavelengths into an experience. The sensation of red exists only within perception. The apple exists. The light exists. The wavelengths exist. But the experience of a red apple emerges through the observer. Once you start looking at perception this way, an entirely new question appears. If color emerges through interpretation, how many other aspects of our reality are also being translated through forms only the brain can understand? Now let's look at sound. The brain also creates sound. And this offers us another opportunity to peek behind the curtain. At this moment, it feels like you are hearing my voice. And if you've watched this Podcast a lot. You're used to hearing my voice. If I suddenly were to show up with an AI episode, you'd hear that and be like, I don't think that's busy at this moment. It sounds like you're hearing my voice. Yet what is moving through the environment is not a voice at all. It's vibration. Tiny fluctuations in air pressure travel through space and reach your ears. Those vibrations then strike the eardrum, causing it to move. Small bones in the middle ear amplify that movement, and they pass it through the cochlea, a remarkable structure that is filled with sensory cells capable of converting vibration into electrical information. Those signals are then going to travel to the auditory cortex, where it begins to identify patterns. Language centers now become involved, and memory systems contribute context. Think immediately of hearing little bits of a song, and your brain can immediately populate that whole song. Some of you, and I know this is true for me, I could hear the starting two notes literally just dun dun, like something that simple. And my brain will already start to populate the whole song. Emotional systems are now brought online to contribute meaning. Networks throughout the brain collaborate in ways that scientists are still trying to understand. And eventually your experience of that sound emerges. You hear a voice, you understand words, you assign meaning. The beauty of this process becomes even more apparent when we think of things like music. Two people can listen to the same exact song and walk away with different experiences. One person might feel joy, another might feel grief. Maybe someone else has a moment of nostalgia that's activated. Maybe somebody feels completely agitated. The sound entering the ears may be identical, but the experience that you associate with it may not be. I'm a big fan of edm. I know a lot of people that hate the music that I love, music that makes me feel at peace, that I can only describe as music to me that sounds like my memory of what heaven is like could quite literally make somebody feel incredibly agitated. So in this way, we know for certain that meaning emerges again through the observer. The music exists, the vibration exists. But the emotional experience is emerging through the nervous system based on the interpretation of those vibrations. So now we see a very clear pattern beginning to form. The world is not simply experiencing consciousness as it is. The brain is actively participating in the creation of our experience. One of the things that is one of the most profound because it's so tactile sensory, is how the brain actually creates touch. Touch, more than maybe even sound or color, feels very deeply convincing because it's real, right? It's physical. We can touch it with our hand you can run your hand across wood grain and feel all of the different striations. The texture appears to exist directly within the wood. The roughness would feel obvious to anybody. The sensation in that way feels very objective. Yet experience actually follows the same pattern here. Pressure receptors in the skin respond to changes in your environment. Temperature receptors then monitor heat or cold. And then other sensory receptors detect stretch, vibration, movement, and force. Information travels through your nerves, into the spinal cord, and ultimately toward regions of the brain that are responsible for constructing your awareness of your body. In space. The somatosensory cortex begins creating a map of what's happening. Things like location, pressure, texture, bodily position like proprioception are all now organized into one coherent experience. What emerges feels like direct contact with reality. Yet again, what emerges is actually nothing more than interpretation. Again, the wood exists, the pressure exists. The interaction of you touching the wood exists. But your experience of that texture is created through your nervous system's interpretation of touching the texture. And that's not going to be the same for every single person. Think about somebody who has some sort of sensory processing disorder. They may be very adverse to touching textures that don't bother you at all. As we continue to move through these examples, I hope that you're starting to feel like. I feel that the brain is very clearly not functioning like a camera, simply recording reality as it is. It's functioning like an active translator. And it's continually transforming raw data into a usable experience. And we can't discount that that usable experience is never separated from our emotions and our memory and the other interpretations we're adding on top of it. And nowhere is this more important than in how we experience pain. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is rational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew youw Mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind. Inside this program, I walk through what's actually happening in the brain. When patterns form by your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure and, and how specific behaviors activate Areas like the anterior mid cingulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline, and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition. Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one. Scripture says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, but most people were never taught how to actually do that. Renew your mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns, strengthen your ability to regulate emotion, and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation. If you've ever felt like your reactions, habits, or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around, this program was built for you. Renew your mind can be accessed at Stan store slash busygold. I know there's kind of this running joke, and I love this comedian, whoever she is. I can't think of her name, but she has this whole bit that I saw go viral on Instagram about how being a woman is all of these micro pains all built to prepare you for childbirth. It's probably one of the funniest two minutes of comedy I've ever seen in my life. And she's sharing some joke where she's, like, talking about the childbirth experience and how painful it is and how her husband's walking around the hospital room like, oh, these new balances are a little stiff. Like, complaining about his shoes. Now, listen, I love you guys. This isn't to rag on men, but it's actually scientifically accurate that men and women feel pain differently. And perhaps men have decreased pain thresholds compared to women because we've got to push a baby out of our. You know what? It's not easy. I've done it four times. It's hard. It really hurts. And yes, there's all these other chemicals coursing through your body, hopefully to make you forget about it afterwards, Although I vividly remember. But the point here is pain is something that, unlike some of the others, perhaps already made sense to you that it was subjective. I have a relatively high pain threshold, so by the time I'm actually in pain, my husband's like, okay, we're in a bad situation here. Because I'll ignore something until I'm, like, on the verge of hospitalization. Other people have a tiny little cough, like, and they're going zoolander. Real quick. I got the black lung. Pop. So at this point, we've explored how the brain transforms light into color, vibration into sound, physical sensations into our experience of touch. But this same thing happens when we're talking about pain. And pain introduces us to a very fascinating layer of this process. Because pain feels obvious, right? If we saw three people all have the same gash, we would expect them all to be in pain. But how each of them are going to experience perhaps even the same type of cut is going to be very, very. So I think we all agree that pain is real. The question is how that reality is created. Most of us grow up assuming that pain is simply an alarm system. Something gets damaged, that alarm goes off to alert you that the pain is there, to show you there's something that needs attention. But the deeper that scientists have actually explored pain, the more complex the picture has become. Pain begins with specialized receptors called nociceptors. These receptors respond to potentially harmful stimuli, and they send information through the nervous system toward the brain. The information then travels to the spinal cord. It passes through relay systems such as the thalamus, and it begins interacting with multiple brain regions all at the same time. The insula is the part of the brain that evaluates the internal state of the body. The anterior cingulate evaluates the significance and the emotional relevance. And this is why if you've ever had something happen, maybe a pain or a cut or a scrape, it can very quickly bring you back to a memory from childhood that was similar. Memory systems do contribute context, even in something like the experience of pain. The prefrontal cortex then contributes interpretation and meaning. And I want to hit the pause button here because I found something really interesting. In going through the data with predictive mind over the last 12 years, there is a correlation between source belief pattern and our experience of pain. We arrive at this through three different pathways. But what's really interesting is on our call number two diagnostic that we conduct in break method, it's one of the checkpoints where we make sure that somebody's pattern hypothesis was accurate. When we do this, patterns on the left hand side have a very different pattern reaction to pain than those on the right side of the brain pattern spectrum. What's interesting here is those on the right side of the brain pattern spectrum typically had parents that actually met their needs when they were in pain or when they were sick, which actually makes the experience of pain persist and become something safer to lean into rather than to push away. So the irony is that actually when your parents meet your needs around pain or sickness, you actually experience pain and sickness. More on the left hand side of the brain pattern spectrum, if you had parents or primary caregivers that actually didn't meet your needs and make you feel safe and loved when you were in pain or when you were sick, your brain actually starts to cut off, arguably through synaptic pruning, some of your connections to that pain so that you can push through it, because no one's going to come come for you. Ultimately, what that does is that makes you feel. Feel less pain. I just think it's totally fascinating. And now for years, roughly, we have maybe 40 to upwards of 250 people doing that every single month. And I have never once seen that rule not be true. So like anything where you're working with data, when you initially start to see a pattern, you're like, oh, this is interesting. Every single year, we find that that pattern, as we expand the numbers, becomes more true. Which is awesome. Which is. It's an interesting thing to think about. For those of you who have young children, not over coddling them around, their pain and sickness is actually something that very much will help them be set up for success as adults. Because when you overdo it with the love and comfort around pain and sickness, they actually feel pain and sickness more and can become, quite literally chemically addicted to it. But that was an aside. So what's relevant to the story that I just shared is that pain actually emerges as the brain's assessment of what is happening, but most importantly, how much or how little that matters. Are you going to fall and scrape your knee and be like, oh, whatever, I'll deal with that later, or are you gonna immediately need to reach for antiseptic and deal with your wound right then and there? This becomes really fascinating when we consider something like phantom limb syndrome. I'm sure you've seen things about it either on TV or in the online space. This is where an individual who has lost a limb can continue to experience pain, pressure, itching, cramping in a limb that they no longer have. The experience feels completely real and that suffering is completely real. Yet the source of the experience is actually in the limb that is no longer attached to them. The source is actually the brain's representation of that limb. I want to pause here for one second because I do think that this may have something to do with it. And I'm kind of jumping the gun here because we are doing a part two on this episode where we'll get more into these aspects. But what's really interesting is they have done experiments where they've had a leaf and they have taken, you know, some sort of a photo of that leaf. I don't know if it was with a cerulean camera. Or something that actually maps the photons and then they can cut off a piece of the leaf and photograph it again. And even though they've cut off that part, the photons that were once there actually still show up on the picture. So that may help us understand why even if we get something amputated, we still feel something there. Because of perhaps things like quantum entanglement, which we'll get into in the next episode. We are still connected to that which does exist on some dimension, just is severed from us on this dimension, which that's a mind boggling topic in and of itself. So I think even in this way, with something like phantom limb syndrome, it's showing us that pain is actually a very profound experience that is far less about the physical reality and much more about our experience of things mapped to the physicality, even if it's now not in this physical dimension. So in that same way, that same principle extends far beyond physical pain. It extends again, like the others, into emotion, relationships, fear, anxiety, memory. When most people hear that pain is constructed by the brain, they often assume that means that pain isn't real. And that is not the conclusion I am attempting to make here at all. Pain is absolutely real. What changes is our understanding of where that experience originates. The brain isn't simply receiving pain from the body like a package being simply delivered. It's evaluating information, assessing threat again, tying it into nostalgia, past memories like I shared with the brain pattern example. Some people, their brain actually pairs off those synapses because our needs weren't met. So we have no benefit with our safety or seeking love by being in pain. Because we generate a rule in early childhood, no one's there to meet that need. So we in essence stop feeling pain as much. That very much ties into this example in many ways. Pain serves as one of the clearest examples that perception is not passive observation, it's an active process of interpretation. I think now you're starting to see that there is a whole hidden world inside of your body that runs through a chain reaction sort of experience. And most people think that perception is something that is directed outward when we look at the world around us, when we listen to sounds, when we interact with objects. But at the same time, an entirely different form of perception is occurring inside of your body. Every single moment you are monitoring an astonishing amount of information that's coming from your internal areas like your heartbeat, your breathing patterns, your blood pressure, your body temperature. You can even feel immune activity, inflammation levels, muscle tension. This process is known as interoception. I Know we talked about this on the weed episode as it pertains to anxiety. If xteroception is your perception of your external world, then interoception is the perception of your internal world. And one of the key structures involved in interoception is the insula. The insula is the monitoring hub and it helps your brain construct moment to moment experiences of what's happening inside of your body. Most people are only vaguely aware of these signals. They notice hunger, maybe fatigue or discomfort. But others experience these signals with extraordinary sensitivity and high. I am one of them. And these are the people that, like we talked about in the weed episode, may get really intense panic attacks from being high. You might be the type of person that notices every single change in your heartbeat, every flutter in your chest, every sensation in your stomach that doesn't feel air quotes normal, every small shift in breathing and any subtle bodily change. This variation in interoceptive sensitivity becomes extremely important when we're examining things like anxiety, panic attacks, chronic stress, even autoimmune conditions, and in my opinion, fibromyalgia. So I want you to imagine two people experiencing the same exact increase in heart rate. One person might notice it briefly and just continue on with their day. The other person, perhaps like me, may notice it and immediately start monitoring it. The brain in this way is curious. It then moves from curiosity to concern. And perhaps with a person like this, fear now gets in the way and now it's detecting an actual threat. Questions start to emerge. Why is my heart beating faster? Am I okay? Should I be worried? Am I having a heart attack? Attention is now narrowing around this perception of escalation. The sensation is now more noticeable, and your increased attention, unfortunately brings increased awareness. And now it's going to actually amplify this whole thing, only driving your heart rate up. Soon the body becomes evidence for a story that your brain is actively constructing. Although the sensation is real, you've added on meaning to it. That's now making it worse, but you're making it worse to fulfill the prophecy your brain has already constructed. The interpretation in this way is subjective. This distinction very much matters because the interpretation determines your experience, right? If I start to fixate on it, I can actually make it worse rather than better. If I notice it and say, oh, that's not even real, it's not even something to worry about. I now am possibly able to lower my heart rate because I've stopped giving it my attention. One of the most fascinating aspects of interoception is that we rarely realize that it's occurring, we tend to assume that we're responding to reality itself, when in many cases, we're actively responding to an interpretation of bodily information that might not have ever needed to happen. The body sends signals, the brain now assigns meaning, and that meaning is going to influence our emotional state. This is why some people who are prone toward panic attacks, in my opinion, have heightened interoception. I think that is one of the key factors that leads certain people toward panic attacks. Pair with it. If you've ever done predictive mind and you know what your brain pattern mapping markers are, There are behavior markers that predispose somebody to fixate on information and not be able to get themselves out of it. I think the heightened interoception with that behavior mechanism Is ultimately what causes the experience of panic attacks. The attention that you're giving, whatever this information is, Is actually what's amplifying not just the awareness, but it can amplify the experience itself. Before long, an entire reality can emerge from a sensation that was interpreted. And this is why I think panic attacks can feel so convincing. This is why you can have a thousand panic attacks and still feel like this one could be a heart attack. The experience feels real and the fear feels real. And technically, the physiological changes are real. But. But you're often in that moment not able to identify and take responsibility for your role in the physiological changes. Right. It feels like you are passively observing them, While the reality is you are actively influencing them. The interpretation driving the experience is what often determines whether the system escalates or settles. And as we begin examining anxiety, panic attacks, or other forms of emotional dysregulation through this lens, we start to see how perception itself really is the largest factor in the equation. The brain is not simply receiving information. It's deciding what that information means. We already know from countless episodes of decoded that the brain is actually just a prediction machine. For much of modern history, Scientists have described the brain As a passive receiver of information. Reality happened first, the brain observed it second. But the more neuroscience advances, the more that picture is evolving, While many of the other facets of it have just, frankly, dissolved. Increasingly, evidence suggests that the brain functions less like a passive observer and more like an active prediction machine that is actively translating Rather than waiting for reality to arrive and then interpreting it. The brain continuously generates expectations about what it believes is happening, and then it compares that information against your expectations. This is why brain pattern mapping, I truly believe, Holds the keys to cracking our mental health crisis. Your brain isn't broken. It's Running an old code break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based on based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to. Because of our predictive nature, most of what we experience is not actually real in an objective sense. We are assuming and we are acting on a self fulfilling prophecy. And then we are all but ensuring that that's how things turn out. Because that's how our brain wanted things to turn out. So I want you to imagine that you are walking through the woods and you're noticing something long and curved lying in the grass. Before conscious thought fully forms, your body has probably reacted. Your muscles may be tensed, your heart rate increased, your attention narrows, and for a brief moment, your brain predicts it's a snake. I don't know if any of you already thought that. I already thought that. The brain predicts it's a snake. Then the additional information arrives. The object becomes clear. Oof, it's a stick. The prediction updates, the nervous system relaxes. What's fascinating is that your body reacted before you actually knew with certainty what it actually was. The brain generated a prediction and it prepared accordingly. And that came with it. A biochemical chain reaction and actual behavior. You probably approached more cautiously. Perhaps you were bracing, perhaps your heart rate went up. But you find out it's not a snake, it's a stick. This process happens constantly. What scares me even more is some brain pattern types, even when they're up close, will still see a snake even though it's a stick. But we will get into that one in part two of this particular episode, because this one's so long, we had to do part two. Your brain predicts what people mean. It also predicts what situations imply. It predicts how conversations will unfold. It predicts whether something will be safe, whether something will be dangerous. It predicts whether people will like you or not. The sad thing like I just described with the person where objectively it's a stick, but they still see a snake. This is what happens when somebody is so locked into their self deception that they quite literally will not hear your actual objective words. They will only hear their interpretation of your words, even if their interpretation is not even a slight match with your words. Most of the time, especially for people like what I'm describing, their predictions are occurring outside of their conscious awareness. This is all happening at a Deep subconscious level. The experience that's reaching their consciousness often feels like reality itself. Yet the process underneath is really just prediction and possibly correction if somebody's able to see the error and adjust. But not all people are able to see the error and adjust. That's the whole hypothesis of my entire body of work, is that we all experience a very specific type of self deception. And those who can be confronted with it, see the error and get out lead a much better quality of life. Those who can't see the error end up often experiencing psychological mechanisms like projection, deflection, blame shifting, splitting, and they in fact are no longer even living in objective reality. The brain is constantly forming assumptions, and these are hardwired rules about what is going to happen, what it expects, how it should engage. And often these rules are not in alignment with how present reality is showing up. So I want you to consider how this realization changes the way you think about perception. If this can happen with things like color, sound, physical touch, pain, what then are we to do with our interpretation of emotion and what somebody means, intention, motive. Do you see how gray this gets? The brain is constantly attempting to anticipate what's going to come next. Incoming information is always compared against existing predictions. And most of you sadly are not able to update that model of information. Even when confronted with new information. When you are presented with an error, your brain often doubles down instead of steps back and be like, huh, that's so interesting. That is not what I was initially thinking, but okay, I'm here for that. And it's because of rules generated in early childhood. It feels unsafe to question the rule because the rule's there to keep you safe, right? I guess the question I'm asking you is, is it what we experience as reality is really just an ongoing conversation between assumption and incoming information. And very little are we actively participating in present moment reality without the influence of the past or projection into the future. Which to me raises a very important question, where are these predictions coming from? I know you know this because we've done extensive work pulling these building blocks. That's the entire hypothesis of my work. And the answer is our childhood. Repetitive inputs, period, full stop, nothing else. That is the primary source of influence. Every experience you've ever had is a partial, if not, you know, majority product of your childhood experiences. Your relationships, your successes, failures, trauma, what worked, what didn't. All these small movements are the data that influences how you see your world today. So in this way, I'm 41 and I've done extensive work on this so maybe more so than the average person. I can see the world around me as a 41 year old. But if we go back five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, no way I was an eight year old interacting with my world. The brain functions like a scientist, constantly generating hypotheses about reality, but it is running a faulty and skewed experiment. You are swapping in like for like in the variables to make sure that you are reconfirming through confirmation bias. And most of you, this is happening completely outside of your conscious awareness. In this way, a child who experiences rejection frequently as a child grows up to expect some level of rejection, maybe they even adopt a way of communicating or behaving that all but ensures that they do get rejected. A child may learn that love is unpredictable, so they start to actually seek out unstable, unpredictable relationships. Years later, your childhood experiences themselves are gone. But you've gone ahead and recreated every single facet of that in your everyday life. In this way, your prediction system generated your whole life. The perception is going to then shift your behavior. It's going to all but ensure you repeat the same outcomes. This is why you can try your hardest to not date the same person. And you keep dating the same person. They may have slightly different looks, or you convince yourself that they're different, but we get ourselves into the same cycle over and over again. And it is because we are not engaging with reality as it is. We are letting our predictions from the past influence how we are responding right now. So now that we've walked through these building blocks, can you see how two people could experience the same exact situation and arrive at two wildly different conclusions? Yeah, I mean, how could we not? And I think big picture, that is the whole mission that I'm on with predictive mind. Our motto is creating emotional intelligence at scale. If every single human was able to understand how their brain is distorting reality so that they can bring back that correction, more people would be able to operate in our actual objective reality rather than these sort of predictive distortions. Can you imagine how much our world would change? We would live in a completely different world. In science, there is a concept called the Bayesian brain. One of the most useful ways to understand this process comes from a concept in science knows as the Bayesian inference. You do not need to understand the mathematics behind it to appreciate the principle. The basic idea is that the brain continuously combines past information with current information to estimate what is most likely happening. Past experiences influence present interpretation. Every prediction represents an educated guess based on available Evidence. Most of the time, this process can be useful. It allows us to navigate a very overwhelmingly complex world without having to sit there and micro analyze every single detail. But at the same time, this creates quite a consequence. Two people can experience the exact same thing and walk away with two wildly different conclusions. And it's not because reality itself changed. It's because the two predictions were different. Their history was different, the meaning they attached to it was different, and the brain pattern that constructed the experience was different. And you've heard me say this on previous episodes. This is why I could go into, let's say, a hiring meeting where I go in with potentially a business partner who has a very different brain pattern than I do. We go in and we conduct an interview where we're both present for the whole thing. I might leave thinking that this person was confident, decisive, attentive, and I want to hire them. But if the other person's brain pattern was very different than me, they could have been triggered by all of those same qualities. They could have seen them as egotistical, boastful, or overly independent and not able to take feedback. What's ultimately true? Well, what's true is nothing is true. Right? We could sit there and kind of hash out the specific traits. Okay, well, when they said this, I interpreted it this way. Oh, well, when they said this, it made me feel this way. So then you have to decide what is the emotional priority structure. But ultimately, this example happens all day long. Now, think about intimate relationships. Most likely you married somebody who has an opposite brain pattern type than you. You guys could both look at the same exact text message. One person interpreted it positively or feel like they. Great example. I feel like I'm constantly bringing my husband into this, but he once sent me a text message because somebody in our company interpreted it as negative. And then he sent it to me and I'm like, babe, I think they interpreted your exclamation points not as excitement, but as aggression. He was like, oh, my God. So in this way, interpretation really is everything. The other person could read one message and interpret criticism, annoyance, or rejection. And the other person could feel like it was warm, friendly, or even funny. This is why something like sense of humor is so subjective. I could say something that I think is funny. My sister, if she were in the room, would surely laugh at me. Not laugh at me, like laugh with me, or maybe at me. Who knows? Doesn't really matter. We pick on each other all the time, but we have a congruent sense of humor. But that's not necessarily True. When it comes to my husband, he might feel like I'm attacking him in the same way that my sister and I do, where we show love. So it's very subjective. The brain uses your different historical information to generate an interpretation. If my sister and I grew up on the easel coast, constantly ragging on each other, that's one of the ways that we show love. But if somebody didn't grow up that way, they might be very sensitive to it. So I want you to take away here that this insight alone is what I want to piggyback on when we move into part two of this episode. Reality might be shared, right? I agree that there is an objective reality, There is an objective record of what occurred, but our experience is almost never uniform. And what I have proven with brain pattern mapping is that when I can put two people with the same brain pattern in the same room, their account of it actually will be strikingly uniform. So that is the whole hypothesis of everything I've done in predictive mind is once we know your brain pattern type, I can know any situation that that person will go into, and I can determine how they're going to see it, what their priority structure would be, what sort of conflict they would generate from that place. And it won't be because those things are objectively tr. It'll be because that is how those people with that brain pattern type see reality in a distorted way. You follow what I'm saying? There is actually no more valuable insight than that. That insight changes the world. So the question that I think changes everything is if color emerges through interpretation, and we know that sound does the same and touch does the same, and pain does the same, and we know that predictions constantly shape perception before it even arrives into our consciousness, then I think we are forced to confront a remarkable possibility. And this thing that we call reality may be far more personal and subjective than you may have realized before you started this episode. And it's not because reality itself in the third dimension actually changed, but it's because your nervous system constructs its own experience of reality. And until you do break method or you crack the code with predictive mind, you have no way of seeing your way out of that. The implications of that realization extend into every facet of your human life. With predictive mind, I can predict how you handle getting lost with directions. I can predict how you're going to handle getting stuck in traffic. Because once we understand those nine markers, I can accurately predict everything about how you engage with reality, because I understand how you perceive reality. This Also extends into how you're going to parent what your perspective on politics is, how you interface with religion, your identity, how you communicate. Everywhere that human beings disagree about what happened. Perception as the root of the problem. Everywhere that human beings become certain that their interpretation is the objective truth, perception is actually the root of the problem. Everywhere that human beings experience emotional suffering, perception is the root of the problem. The deeper you start to explore the brain, the more you discover that perception is not just a simple passive recording. It is an active construction that will either make or break your experience on planet Earth. And with it, every emotional experience you have, every bodily sensation that you have. What feels obvious to one person may be entirely invisible to the other. What feels threatening to one person might actually feel exciting to the other. What feels like rejection to one person might feel completely neutral or maybe even a positive to the other. And once you firmly wrap your head around that, you can finally start to examine why two people could witness the same event and have two totally different realities. And that is precisely where we were going next. Because the story becomes even more fascinating when we start to explore attention, memory, emotional salience, and the powerful systems that determine what enters your awareness and what you simply filter out. Those systems explain why human beings rarely perceive the exact same thing in the exact same way, and why certainty can sometimes become one of the biggest obstacles to the truth. And that is why I will give you a reminder that I've surely given you in other shows about what has to happen in the pursuit of healing. You can pursue truth or you can pursue healing, but you can't pursue both at the same time. Because the more you try to seek certainty, the more you're actually blocked from learning how to re pattern your nervous system to actually experience the truth. On part two, we are going deep into Plato's cave simulation theory and a totally mind bending journey. All all in the process to get to one of my keystone episodes of the season that's all about what actually is mental illness. We have to understand the malleable, subjective, distorted experience of reality to understand what causes mental illness. So we're almost there. Next week is part two of this and then we are going right into what is mental illness really. Share this with somebody who needs it. Share it with somebody who will find this interesting. Hey, share it with somebody. Podcast hosts that need to have me on their show. I'll see you guys next time. Bye.