Your brain doesn’t detect reality. It creates it. | Lisa Feldman Barrett
Big Think・2 minutes read
Our reality is constructed by our sensory experiences and brain signals, leading to the brain's challenge of inferring causes of outcomes. The brain uses past experiences to predict future events, creating categories of instances based on similarities, while also constructing 'Social reality' by collectively imposing agreed-upon meanings on objects like money or borders.
Insights
- Our brain uses past experiences to predict future events by categorizing instances based on similarities in sensory and motor features or abstract patterns.
- Humans can collectively construct 'Social reality' by assigning agreed-upon meanings to objects like money or government actions, which are not inherent but imposed functions.
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Recent questions
How does the brain shape reality?
By receiving sensory signals and predicting future events.
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Summary
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Shaping Reality: Brain's Imagination and Perception
- Reality is shaped by our sensory experiences and brain signals, with the brain receiving outcomes of changes in the world or body, leading to the 'Reverse inference problem' where it must guess the cause of these outcomes.
- The brain utilizes past experiences to predict future events, creating categories of instances to make these predictions, based on similarities in sensory and motor features or abstract patterns.
- Humans can construct 'Social reality' by collectively imposing functions on objects, such as money, borders of countries, or government actions, which are agreed upon meanings rather than inherent physical properties.
- The brain's capacity for imagination allows it to create entirely new experiences based on past knowledge, but this ability can also lead to difficulty in staying present, requiring practice to balance between being constrained by immediate surroundings and being free of them.
