Is your brain lying to you?

Summary

Today, Explained – "Is your brain lying to you?"

Vox – December 21, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Today, Explained explores how our brains interpret and sometimes distort sensory information—most notably, through the phenomenon of tinnitus (“ringing in the ears”). With the help of guest Noam Hassenfeld (from Vox’s Unexplainable), experts, and firsthand accounts, the hosts examine not only why we experience tinnitus, but how our perceptions are actively constructed by the brain, raising big questions about what’s “real” in our sensory experiences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Tinnitus?

• Definition and Manifestation:

  • Tinnitus is described as a persistent ringing or buzzing in the ears, which can range from mildly annoying to utterly debilitating (01:16–01:31).
  • For some, it's temporary (like after a loud concert); for others, it's a constant, high-pitched sound that impacts day-to-day life.

• Personal Story – Kelly’s Experience:

  • Listener Kelly developed tinnitus in her mid-twenties; at first, she thought it was the plumbing in her house since nobody else could hear the sound (02:11–03:01).
  • It worsened over time, affecting her social life and sleep:

    "It's like you're just trapped in a room with a crying kid. You can't stop crying or anything." — Kelly (03:26)

2. The Problem of Hidden Hearing Loss

• Normal Hearing Tests May Miss the Problem:

  • Kelly passed her audiology tests, leading to frustration and confusion (05:21).
  • Explanation: Standard hearing tests focus on the “soft sound” fibers, not those damaged by loud sounds. Damaged “loud sound” fibers (which won’t show up in typical tests) relate to what’s called “hidden hearing loss.”

    "The gold standard of hearing evaluation... is completely insensitive to the loss of those fibers." — Noam Hassenfeld quoting Stephane Maison (07:25)

• How It Connects to Tinnitus:

  • Damage to certain auditory nerve fibers leads the brain to "expect" input it isn't getting, which can result in the brain generating its own sounds (tinnitus).

3. The Brain’s Climate Control Analogy

• Self-Regulation Gone Awry:

  • The brain tries to maintain a “set point” for expected sensory input—like a thermostat keeping room temperature steady (08:03–08:20).
  • If auditory input is reduced (e.g., due to nerve fiber damage), the brain “turns up the volume” internally and creates phantom sound (tinnitus) to fill the gap.

    "It's kind of like turning on the heat, but it can't get the sound it needs, so it creates its own sound." — Noam Hassenfeld (08:36)

• Comparison to Phantom Limb:

  • Similar to phantom limb syndrome where missing limbs still seem to produce sensations, tinnitus is the brain creating sensations in the absence of actual stimuli (09:14).

4. Tinnitus as an Example of Brain “Superpower”

• Sensory Construction as Both Asset and Curse:

  • Our brain's tendency to “edit” and make sense of chaotic input is generally beneficial:
    • Example: The brain sculpts sound waves into comprehensible elements (words, bird songs, etc.) (13:21–14:17).

    "The world is just a big blob of sound and somehow our brain can pick out birdsong, word, car honk." — Noam Hassenfeld (13:21)

• Audio Illusions:

  • The "octave illusion": Even though both ears receive the same sequence of high and low notes, people perceive them as alternating between ears, illustrating how the brain edits raw data for clarity (14:38–15:59).

• Brain Training:

  • With enough practice or new sensory devices (like cochlear implants), people can re-train their brains to interpret sounds more accurately:

    "He practiced listening over and over again, and he retrained his brain so that it sounded less robotic and metallic." — Noam, on Mike Korast's adaptation to his cochlear implant (16:42–17:20).

5. Treatments & Coping with Tinnitus

• Masking (White Noise):

  • Some find relief by using noise to “mask” the ringing (white, pink, or brown noise), but this can backfire by directing attention to the tinnitus (18:05–18:55).
  • “One of the things that can actually make tinnitus worse is thinking about it.” — Hassenfeld (18:50)

• Mindfulness and Acceptance:

  • Gradually allowing the tinnitus to blend with other environmental sounds and not focusing on it is currently the best-available approach.

    “I’m actually just trying to take in all the sounds...just recognizing that sound, too.” — Kelly (19:35)

• No Quick Fixes:

  • Some researchers are experimenting with nerve growth proteins and retraining neural responses, but these are in early stages (17:34–18:05).

6. Perception: Hearing, Seeing, and Beyond

• Sensory Construction is Universal:

  • Discussion with Dr. Pascal Wallis (NYU neuroscientist):
    • The brain constructs realities for all senses: seeing faces in clouds (pareidolia), feeling itches that originate in the brain (neuropathic itch), etc. (23:58–24:32).
    • “You're seeing meaning everywhere. This is like man's search for meaning, basically, but in your brain.” — Wallis (24:28)

• The Blue/Gold Dress Phenomenon:

  • The infamous blue/black vs. white/gold dress: Perceptions differ based on personal experiences with light and daily routines, such as being a night owl (25:16–26:01).

    "Some people legitimately see as white and gold, some as black and blue. What we could show is it has to do with your assumptions about lighting." — Wallis (25:25)

• Language as Auditory Construction:

  • When learning a foreign language, the brain begins to insert (nonexistent) word boundaries, showing how our minds interpret ambiguous input (26:01–26:43).

7. Why Does the Brain Interpret Ambiguously?

• Survival, Not Accuracy:

  • The brain’s rapid, sometimes inaccurate interpretations serve survival: acting quickly is prioritized over precision (26:50–28:09).

    “If you were sitting around until you have all of the information...some other animal would have already eaten your lunch or maybe eaten you.” — Wallis (27:08)

• Reliability and Humility:

  • While our senses are reliable for navigating the world, everyone’s experience is slightly different—so we should remain humble about what we “know” (28:09–28:52).

8. Are We Living in the Matrix?

• Brains as Playwrights:

  • “It feels like our brains are just kind of putting on a play for us. We're not actually hearing the stuff that's out there. It's like the stuff that's out there is the script, and then our brain is reading the script for us and acting it out." — Noam Hassenfeld (20:31)

• Pascal’s Take:

  • Asked if we’re living in the Matrix, Dr. Wallis replies, “In all likelihood, yeah.” (28:56)

• A Deeper Reality:

  • Our perceptions are limited—they're the interface, not the whole reality.

    "We're sharing a low dimensional, three dimensional...embedding space. But there's a much deeper reality out there that our brain senses can't see." — Wallis (29:18)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Tinnitus explained and Kelly’s story: 01:16–04:11
• Why standard hearing tests fail (hidden hearing loss): 05:21–07:32
• The brain’s “climate control” analogy for tinnitus: 08:03–09:14
• Phantom limb, the brain’s need to fill in missing data: 09:14–09:53
• Audio illusions, octave illusion, perception editing: 13:21–16:08
• Cochlear implant and retraining the brain: 16:15–17:28
• Current coping strategies for tinnitus: 17:34–19:35
• Seeing is also believing—visual perception tricks, “the dress”: 24:32–26:01
• Why the brain jumps to conclusions (survival): 26:50–28:09
• Philosophy: Are we in the Matrix? What is reality?: 28:52–29:45

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "I've grown so distant from my friends because with the lack of sleep, you're just not in any other mood for anybody." — Kelly (03:48)

• "That is a form of tinnitus. That's temporary tinnitus, and it usually goes away. But Kelly's tinnitus wasn't." — Jacqueline Glen Hill (04:39–04:48)

• "The gold standard of hearing evaluation...is completely insensitive to the loss of those fibers." — Noam Hassenfeld quoting Stephane Maison (07:25)

• "It's kind of like turning on the heat, but it can't get the sound it needs, so it creates its own sound." — Noam Hassenfeld (08:36)

• "Why would our brains do that to us?" — Jacqueline Glen Hill (09:53)

• "The world is just a big blob of sound and somehow our brain can pick out birdsong, word, car honk." — Noam Hassenfeld (13:21)

• "You’re seeing meaning everywhere. This is like man’s search for meaning, basically, but in your brain." — Pascal Wallis (24:28)

• "Your senses are not there for your viewing pleasure. It's there for survival." — Pascal Wallis (26:50)

• "It feels like our brains are just kind of putting on a play for us. We're not actually hearing the stuff that's out there." — Noam Hassenfeld (20:31)

• "In all likelihood, yeah." — Pascal Wallis, on whether we're living in the Matrix (28:56)

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Final Reflections

• Sensory Perception is Actively Built: Hearing, sight, and all senses are subject to constant active interpretation and editing by the brain. This allows us to make quick decisions but also means our experience of reality is inherently subjective.

• We All See the World a Little Differently: From tinnitus to the color of “the dress,” assumptions, context, and personal history shape our every perception.

• Embrace Uncertainty and Curiosity: Accepting that our senses are just one version of reality can feel unsettling but also opens up a greater appreciation for both the power and limits of the human mind.

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For more on how we interpret sound, check out the referenced Unexplainable series “The Sound Barrier.”

Transcript

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

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[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

If you don't know what tinnitus is, it's like that ringing you hear in your ears after getting out of a loud concert. But it's all the time, the den.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Of the tinnitus, just constantly going on.

[Pascal Wallis]

This is like man's search for meaning, basically, but in your brain.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, before we jump in, I need you to do me a favor. How do you pronounce this word?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Aha. Yeah. Okay, so there are two ways to pronounce it. Most people say tinnitus, but all the researchers I spoke to say tinnitus.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

This is my colleague, Noam Hassenfeld. He hosts Unexplainable, a show all about exploring scientific mysteries.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

When I reported this episode, I said tinnitus. That's the one I chose.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, well, normally I'm a tinnitus girl, but when in Rome.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Which one do you want to do? We can. We can go whatever way you want. It's your show.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

IDUS is a persistent ringing in the ears and it can range from mild to straight up debilitating. That was the case for a listener named Kelly. It's like the high pitch ringing you usually hear in your ear every now and then, but it's like more intense and it's just there the whole time. She wrote into Unexplainable, hoping to understand what exactly was going on with her hearing.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

She said that she got tinnitus something like four years ago when she was about 25.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I noticed it around just New Year's time. I just Remember, there was something on the right side of my ear going.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

On, and it was going like, do.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Do, do, do, do, do, do. And I thought it was just the pipes. I kept asking my fiance if he's been hearing something going on in the.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

He wasn't hearing anything. So that didn't make sense to her. She went to her family. They were kind of like, don't worry about it. But then she started hearing a pitch in her other ear, and this one was just kind of like that straight, high pitch, just like do. And so she's hearing both of these things in each ear, and it's just kind of driving her crazy.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I mean, it's. It's like you're just trapped in a room with a crying kid. You can't stop crying or anything. You don't know how to just make it stop.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

She said it got worse in louder environments. So she had to leave her job. She stopped seeing her friends. She had trouble sleeping.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I've grown so distant from my friends because with the lack of sleep, you're just not in any other mood for anybody. And you can't show up like you used to for any of the things that you've done. I've experienced ringing in my ears before, you know, after a concert or, you know, a night out. But it went away after a little while. That's a version of tinnitus, too, right?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah, Yeah. I spoke to this scientist, Stephane Maison, at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital in Boston. He's the director of the tinnitus clinic there, and he told me that, yeah, if you go to a concert and, you know, you listen to loud music and then you leave the concert and it gets really quiet, and you just hear that ringing as they leave the concert, the hearing is not quite the same.

[Pascal Wallis]

You feel that your hearing is a little bit muffled. You can even experience that ringing in your ears.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That is a form of tinnitus. That's temporary tinnitus, and it usually goes away.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

But Kelly's tinnitus wasn't. This is. Explain it to me from Vox. I'm Jon Gwyn hill. More than 100 million people around the world suffer from this severe form of the condition. And when Noam and his team set out to understand why, he learned all sorts of things. Not just how we hear, but how our brain shapes the way we perceive everything around us. So Kelly went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on, but left her appointments feeling even more confused.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

When she went to get her hearing checked, her audiologist told her her Hearing was fine. Like, she fully passed this hearing test. And that made her feel so crazy. Right? She had this thing that was forcing her to pull away from everything in her life. And the doctor saying, your hearing is fine.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

That is so weird. Why would a hearing test not pick up on this if it's so persistent?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah. So this is what I found so fascinating about this recent research that's been going on. This is research that Stefan was doing at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston. It's something called hidden hearing loss. Basically, in your ear, there's fibers that respond to soft sounds, and there's fibers that respond to loud sounds. So that means there's fibers that respond to whispers or kind of the ASMR stuff. And then there's fibers that really get activated if you're crossing the street or near an airplane or a vacuum cleaner or something. And on a hearing test, what they do is they put you in this, you know, soundproof room. The audiologist sits next to you, says.

[Pascal Wallis]

Raise your hand whenever you can hear a beep.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And the beep gets softer and softer and softer until you can't hear the beep. And what they're doing is just testing the soft fibers. They're just testing if you can hear the quietest possible noise. And if you can hear the quietest possible noise, they say, hey, your hearing's fine. But that doesn't test damage that could happen to the loud fibers. And you can see what happens to people who have damage to loud fibers. If you're in a restaurant and notice that you can't understand, the person across from you might be loud, might be in a bar or something. But if you're in a quiet room, you'll have no problem hearing the conversation. What's happening there is you have damage in your louder fibers, and that damage is not gonna show up on a hearing test. But that damage could lead to tinnitus. That's the type of hidden hearing loss that could end up leading to tinnitus. So the gold standard of hearing evaluation.

[Pascal Wallis]

Around the world to this day is.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Completely insensitive to the loss of those fibers.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Well, I will say I've been blaming the restaurant situation on the fact that. Why is there a DJ in here? It's so loud.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Well, it's just too loud, right? I mean, come on. Like, we don't need a. We don't need a scientist to tell us they need to turn the music down at a restaurant.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay. So hidden hearing loss may factor into tinnitus, but whether the ringing in your ears is Persistent or temporary. Noam says that buzzing sound is actually your brain trying to tell you something.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

One of the researchers I talked to, Dan Pauly, who's also at Mass, Eye and Earth, he said it's basically like a climate control system in your brain.

[Pascal Wallis]

You program it to maintain an ambient temperature of, whatever, 70 degrees, and then.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

The temperature goes down, you know, 68, whatever. The heat's gonna kick on, and, like.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Hot air will come out of your.

[Pascal Wallis]

Vents and bring the ambient temperature back.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

To the set point, and then the heating shuts off. Now, what happens in your brain is your brain is kind of doing a similar thing for sound, but when some of the nerve fibers are damaged, you're getting less input than the brain would expect.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

And.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And so it's kind of like turning on the heat, so to speak, but it can't get the sound that it needs, so it kind of creates its own sound to fill in that gap.

[Pascal Wallis]

Oh, these neurons sensitize themselves. They're like, oh, I need to make my activity level go back to where.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It'S supposed to be.

[Pascal Wallis]

I'm going to swap out different parts.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And make myself more sensitive to excitatory inputs. So now you start to perceive a.

[Pascal Wallis]

Sound that is not there.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

The process doesn't work as it's supposed to.

[Pascal Wallis]

Like, the heating system turns on, but.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

It doesn't turn off.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Stefan told me it's almost like a form of phantom limb syndrome where, you know, you might have had your leg amputated. The leg is gone, but you start to feel pain where it's missing. Now your brain is no longer getting the nerve input from your leg or your foot, but it is kind of like creating the sensation it expects to feel.

[Pascal Wallis]

Your brain is artificially increasing the perception.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So in the case of touch, if you touch you with my finger like this, you're gonna feel my finger, but.

[Pascal Wallis]

If I increase the perception, that's gonna turn into pain.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And in a lot of ways, that's often what's happening with tinnitus.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Why would our brains do that to us?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This is what I find so fascinating because it just seems like it's this, like, curse, right? Why would our brain do something so torturous to us? Why would it make up a sound that would keep us up at night? But it turns out I found out in reporting this series that this is actually kind of the tip of the iceberg of the way our brain hears the world. And it's kind of the dark side of a superpower that allows us to even hear the world to begin with.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

So our brain has a superpower. How do we use it for good? That's up next. Support for the show comes from GiveWell. GiveWell is an independent resource that offers transparent research about great giving opportunities. They spent 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation and they say they only direct funding to the highest impact opportunities they found. Here are some examples of what donations to GiveWell's recommended charities can achieve bed nets and preventative medication to reduce outbreaks of malaria, distributing vitamin A supplements to reduce deficiencies and save lives and cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines. Over 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to direct more than $2.5 billion, and according to GiveWell, rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 300,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. To make a tax deductible donation Today, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter extension Explain It To Me at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from Explain it to Me. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or to find out more. Support for Explain it to me comes from AG1. AG1 NextGen is a daily health drink that they say combines your multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfoods and antioxidants into one simple green scoop. Our colleague Andrew melnczyk has tried AG1 next gen. Here's what he has to say.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

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[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

AG1 has their best offer ever. If you head to drinkag1.com explain it. You'll get the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a bottle of vitamin D3K2, an AG flavor sampler, and you'll get to try their new sleep supplement AGZ for free. That's drinkag1.com explainit for $126 in free gifts for new subscribers. We're back. It's Explain it to Me. I'm JQ and we're talking to Unexplainable's Noam Hassenfeld about tinnitus and it turns out that annoying ringing in your ears. It's Just one example of the way your brain does its job. By the way, you're going to want to put on headphones for this next part.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

All right, so tinnitus is your brain constructing a sound. When it's not getting the input it expects it. It's your brain editing the world you hear. And the thing is, what sounds in tinnitus, like, it might be a problem. It's actually a necessary way that our brain works in order to let us hear anything at all. So imagine a waveform, right? If you just look at a waveform, it's just going to be a blob of sound. But it's got maybe a word in there. It's got a car honk, it's got a bird song. The world is just a big blob of sound and somehow our brain can pick out birdsong word, car, honk. And it's because our brain can edit this waveform blob of sound. And you can actually hear your brain doing this editing in real time.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Oh. Oh, yeah. I would love to hear my brain do something.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So I talked to Diana Deutsch, who's this psychology professor at UC San Diego, and she likes to study all these weird ways our brain edits the world. These weird kind of audio glitches. She loves to research audio illusions.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Oh, yeah. Like do you hear someone saying Laurel or do you hear them saying yanny?

[Pascal Wallis]

Laurel.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Laurel.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yes, exactly. Oh, okay. It's exactly Laurel. Yanny. One of these illusions I love is called the octave illusion. I wonder if I can play it for you. Tell me what you hear.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, I hear one note in my left ear and one note in my right ear. And they are going back and forth.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Kind of ping ponging low on one side, high on the other, right?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Okay. I hear the exact same thing. The issue is that there is a low note and a high note on each side. Each ear is getting low, high, low, high, low, high. They're overlaid over each other. You think you're just getting low, one ear high in the other, but you're actually getting two sequences of low, high. And the reason you only hear low in one side and high on the other is that your brain is editing the sequence for you. Because your brain needs to separate sounds to make sense of them, right? It has to separate that blobby waveform to pull out the words or the bird song. And that's what it's doing. It's pulling out high and low and separating them between your ears.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Can I make my brain stop doing that?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I really have no idea. I cannot listen to this and hear the tones in both sides.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Wow.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Like, I just hear low on one side, high on the other side, even though I know that that's not actually what the audio is.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

But in his reporting, Noam found out that people are trying to train their brains, and they're having some success.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I even spoke to this science writer named Mike Korast, who lost his hearing and then got a cochlear implant. And it made everything sound kind of weird and robotic. Like, you ever see that movie Sound of Metal with the. Yeah, Res Ahmed, where the drummer loses hearing, he gets a cochlear implant, and everything sounds metallic and robotic and glitchy.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Reuben, this does not sound like you remember.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

And it's the implant in your head.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That'S tricking your brain into thinking that you're actually hearing amazing movie. But what this guy Mike did is that he practiced, and he retrained his brain to listen to music. He really wanted to listen to his favorite piece of music, Bolero. It was kind of my piece of music that I would come to again and again and again to test out new hearing aids. And he practiced listening over and over again. He remembered what it sounded like, and he retrained his brain so that it sounded less robotic and metallic. So this was an iterative process that.

[Pascal Wallis]

Went on and is still going on.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And he told me that he can listen to Bolero again and really enjoy it. He actually retrained his brain. He used this superpower.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, so does that mean we can train our brains to stop the ringing in our ears?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It is not that simple. Tinnitus usually comes from hearing damage, and it's really difficult to figure out the best way to fix that. There are some people out there thinking about trying to actually fix the damaged fibers, like regrow their connections with a protein called neurotrophin. There's another scientist I talked to who's trying to retrain individual neurons using the sense of touch, which is really cool, like playing a tinnitus sound and then putting an electrode on the spine and kind of trying to activate the individual neurons when that sound is coming in. Kelly tried something different. She tried to do something called masking, which is listening to kind of white noise or pink noise or brown noise that's sort of at the same frequency as her tinnitus. You know, kind of like sleeping with a fan on to drown out traffic noise or something. And it did help her a bit. But some of the researchers I spoke to don't love that idea because it can make you constantly be thinking about the tinnitus even more. And one of the things that can actually make tinnitus worse is thinking about it. Like, when I was speaking to Stefan, he told me he had tinnitus, and he was like, and actually, it's way worse than normal right now because we've been talking about it for an hour, and it's really annoying.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

So wait, the way you're supposed to deal with tinnitus is just, like, not think about it. That feels like when people tell you, like, hey, stop being anxious, and it's like, oh, okay, I'll shut that off.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I mean, honestly, it really, really does. It's so frustrating. The best way that is available right now for treating tinnitus does seem to be something like mindfulness. I look at the example of Kelly. She said, okay, I was using these maskers before, but I'm trying not to use the maskers anymore. I'm trying to let my brain hear the entire world again.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I'm actually just trying to take in all the sounds. I'll have the windows open because the maintenance guys are working or the gardeners. And I mean, even trying to, like, vacuum without any type of, like, hearing protection and just recognizing that sound, too.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

You know, she told me she went to go see fireworks, and at first the fireworks were, like, really upsetting and scary, and she kind of got used to it.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

This is what we used to do. Like, it's literally just. It's really weird to know the world again.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And that's not to say it's been easy. That's not to say her tinnitus is gone. But what she's doing now is just trying her best to hear the tinnitus along with everything else.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Has this reporting made you think differently about how our brains work?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Oh, yeah. First of all, it's made me so paranoid about my hearing.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

By the end of these conversations with these scientists, I basically got to the point where I guess I would say that it feels like our brains are just kind of putting on a play for us. We're not actually hearing the stuff that's out there. It's like, the stuff that's out there is the script, and then our brain is reading the script for us and acting it out. And that's actually what we're observing.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Is our world a lie? Like, what of anything we hear is real.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It's not a lie. I think our perception does a lot more work than we would think.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Coming up. Our brains aren't just interpreting sounds differently. Why? Maybe you shouldn't believe what you see either. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Does this sound familiar? You're in line at checkout cart full of items, your toddler is screaming for a treat, and you realize you left your wallet in the car. Or was it at home? No need to panic. With your iPhone in hand, you can tap to pay using Apple Card with Apple Pay and you'll earn unlimited daily cash back when you do so. If your credit card is an Apple card, maybe it should be subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com. Give big Save big with RAC Friday.

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

Today.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

It's explaining to me. I'm jq and now we know when it comes to sound, our brains are shaping what we hear. So what does it do with our other senses?

[Pascal Wallis]

My name is Pascal Wallis, and I serve as a professor of data science, neuroscience and psychology at New York University, and I study whether the Matrix, the movie, is a documentary.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

How would it be a documentary?

[Pascal Wallis]

So the question is, does your brain basically create a matrix for you? What is real?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

How do you define real?

[Pascal Wallis]

So you're not seeing reality unfiltered, you're just living in the Matrix. Like literally.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

If you're talking about what you can.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Feel, what you can smell, what you.

[Pascal Wallis]

Can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

So it's this idea that our senses are subjective, Correct?

[Pascal Wallis]

Because everything that you perceive is filtered for your sensory organs and then goes through your brain. And if we assume that you have a unique brain, which I do, then you're bringing a lot of yourself to what you experience.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, so earlier in the show, we heard about how tinnitus happens when our brain creates a sound that's not actually there. Does that happen with other senses, too?

[Pascal Wallis]

In a nutshell, yes. This is general to all the senses, including smell, including taste, for instance. If you think about something like neuropathic itch, where you think there's something itching you, but it's in your mind. But I want to be very clear for those of your listeners who have neuropathic itch. It is very real in your mind, even though your mind generates it. I'm sure you have seen faces in clouds that were not there, or faces in your wallpaper. So this is actually very common. Yes. You're seeing meaning everywhere. This is like man's search for meaning, basically, but in your brain, your brain search for meaning and you attach this to everything.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Okay, yeah, I have looked up at the clouds and seen things. So that's my brain constructing my visual reality.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yes.

[Pascal Wallis]

My biggest flex is that I figured out why some people see the dress, the infamous black and blue, white and gold dress that was serviced in February of 2015.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Batten down the hatches now. Time for the great debate.

[Pascal Wallis]

All right, this one has everyone asking, what color is this dress?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

And now it's being called the dress that broke the Internet. Riddle me this. What's black and blue or gold and white? And has us debating all over, by.

[Pascal Wallis]

The way, what did you see it as? Right in gold or black and blue?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I saw black and blue, but my friends saw white and gold. And I was like, am I like, what do you mean you see white and gold? That doesn't look anything like white and gold.

[Pascal Wallis]

And are you more like a night owl or more like a morning person?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

I have developed into a morning person.

[Pascal Wallis]

But you historically are night owl.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Yes.

[Pascal Wallis]

Yeah, there you go. And so, yeah, we had a study where we showed, yes, some people legitimately see as white and gold, some as black and blue. What we could show is it has to do with your assumptions about lighting. If you assume the thing was backlit or in a shadow or illuminated by white light, bright light, sunlight, it would be white and gold. And if you assumed it was artificial light or inside, then you would see it as black and blue. And that has to do with what you have seen more of. So if you're like a night owl, you've seen more artificial light. By the way, just to be clear, it's not going to be true for everybody because this lifestyle is only a proxy for light exposure, but something we can measure.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

What about with languages? Like, how does that work?

[Pascal Wallis]

So, for instance, if you hear a foreign language, at least initially, it might just sound like gibberish to you. Like you can't even make out individual words. And frankly, they're not there. If you look at the pure audio stream, there's just one word after the next. Like, if you listen to Japanese or Italian. So some languages are very. Spanish has a very fast, like, cadence. But once you start to learn the language, you will Start to hear breaks in the words, but they're not there. They are put in by your mind. There is no objective break between the words. This parsing signal comes from you.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Oh, wow, that's so interesting. Is there a hypothesis or a reasoning why our brains work this way, why they do this?

[Pascal Wallis]

Of course, absolutely. Your senses is not there for your viewing pleasure. It's there for survival. So you survive better than otherwise. Yes. And if you were sitting around until you have all of the information, until all the sensory information was unambiguous, some other animal would have already eaten your lunch or maybe eaten you and all of your ancestors that that happened to. They're no longer with us. They're in a better place now, I guess. But you're the offspring of survivors who, the moment they could make a call, they made a call, they acted on it. And often to boost that, to boost that time wise to be faster, you have to put in your own guesses. So you basically have to jump to conclusions. And the idea is the conclusion can be wrong, but it's better than not to act. I'll give an example. Let's say you're in the forest and there is actually a tiger somewhere in the forest. And you start getting a bad sense of it. Maybe you smelled something faint, maybe you saw a little toe of a tiger somewhere and then you bolted. You left your ancestors, who are like, I need more information, they want to see the full tiger before I make any moves while they're eaten by the tiger. Because by the time you see the tiger, it's too late. And what's the cost of being wrong? Well, you got a little scared, but that's okay, you know, we can live with that. Literally. Maybe a little scared. We have an anxiety disorder. It's not great, but you are alive. Whereas if you're wrong in the other way, you're dead and you cannot reproduce.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

What does all of this tell us about how reliable our senses are? Can we trust how we're interacting with the world?

[Pascal Wallis]

Well, overall they're very reliable. But you have to understand that they're reliable because of many redundant systems. So for instance, auditory and visual work together and the other senses too. And there's a lot of information, all that, but different people bring different things to the table. So I think the real lesson is we need to be more modest and more humble about how sure you are about what you think is true. What I mean by that is you see the things how you see them, right? So you saw it as white and gold, or as Black and blue. There's nothing else to it. You believe it is black and blue because that's how you saw it. But the reality is your brain doesn't tell you. Oh, we just guessed here. So it makes no distinction between that.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

So are we living in the Matrix?

[Pascal Wallis]

In all likelihood, yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between.

[Pascal Wallis]

The dream world and the real world?

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

Wow. It's like we can trust our brains because they keep us safe. But everything may not always be what it appears.

[Pascal Wallis]

Correct? Here's the reality. You and I and everybody else who's watching this or listening to this, we're sharing a low dimensional, three dimensional, maybe embedding space. But there's a much deeper reality out there that our brain senses can't see. There's no question about that. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means it's deeper than you think. We don't know what it is. It could be anything.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

How do we remain satisfied if there's this world that's right in front of us that we're kind of not experiencing? Because this is what our brains are doing.

[Pascal Wallis]

Well, I guess to act in the world, and that's the whole point of why we have the senses, is we have to pretend that this is it. We have to act as if. Yes, but this gives you at least me a lot of comfort, right? This might not be all there is. There might be a deeper reality out there. So this might not be all there is. And that might be amazing and exciting.

[Jacqueline Glen Hill]

That's it for today. If you want to learn more about how we hear the world around us, you can check out Unexplainable's amazing series called the Sound Barrier wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, you can support us by becoming a VOX member. When you join, you get perks like ad free podcasts. Head to vox.commembers to join today. We want your help with an upcoming episode about a simpler time. The golden age of the Internet. Are there websites that you miss? Old stuff from the Internet you wish you could get back? Tell us about it. Call 1-800-618-8545 or you can email askvox.com this episode was produced by Avishai Artsy and it was edited by Ginny Lawton. It was fact checked by Melissa Hirsch and engineered by David Tadashore. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. Special thanks to our friends at Unexplainable. I'm your host, Jacqueline Glen Hill. Thank you so much for listening. We're off next week, but we'll talk to you in the new year. Bye.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

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[Pascal Wallis]

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera.

[Pascal Wallis]

They see us.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

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