As Professor Alexandru Babeș explains, the human brain contains nearly 100 billion neurons (a number comparable to all the stars in our galaxy) and at least as many glial cells that play an essential role in brain function. On average, each neuron connects with (and receives information from) about 10,000 other neurons, resulting in approximately 10 to the power of 15 synapses (as the contacts between two neurons are called), that is, a quadrillion synapse. Our brain is an incredibly complicated mechanism, so Emily Dickinson’s poem,
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
holds truth to it.
This mental necessity for complexity becomes clear when we consider how the brain processes and interprets the world around us. From the day we are born until the day we die, our brain continuously receives clues from the outside world via our eyes, ears, nose, skin, etc. We do not perceive this information as sights, smells, or sounds but as light waves, chemicals, and changes in air pressure. Then, this sensory data is translated into millions of electrical pulses. While reading these electrical pulses, our brain builds our reality, using its senses as fact-checkers and quickly adjusting to new data.
Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain. It’s not the kind of hallucination that sends you to the hospital. It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to your sense data, and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.
Lisa Feldman Barrett – Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
The world we think is “out there” is, in fact, a reconstruction of reality inside our skulls. This hallucinated world of our neural models is not built with tremendous accuracy. While capable of holding vast amounts of information, our brain is inherently fallible. It does not function as a perfect recorder of events but rather as an editor, selectively capturing moments deemed significant and later reconstructing them into a coherent narrative.
This process is prone to gaps and errors, leading to thoughts that, while convincing, may not accurately reflect reality. For example, we “see” things that are not there (snakes in the grass), or we don’t see things that are there (e.g., this two-minute video).
Consider the phenomenon of déjà vu (meaning “already seen” in French). Déjà vu occurs when our brain mistakenly feels that a new experience has happened before. It seems like we have already been to this place, had this conversation, and so on. One of the explanations for this sensation is that the hippocampus evaluates sensations against long-term memories. When it cannot align a current sensory input with past experiences, the disconnection triggers the eerie sense of familiarity that defines déjà vu.
More information can be stored in your brain than there are grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world. People’s real problem with memory isn’t how much they can store, it’s getting that information into or out of memory. It’s kind of like trying to find your keys, except maybe about a quadrillion times harder.
Our memories are not just records of the past but are dynamic constructs influenced by our current knowledge, emotions, and biases. This is what the brain does: sometimes, it will construct half a truth and half a lie. Our perception of memory recollection is not a mirror but a smoky reconstruction, a creative revision by the brain that prioritizes significance over comprehensive accuracy.
Memory works like a connect-the-dots puzzle; we fill in many details after the event.
Carol Tavris and Carole Wade – Psychology in Perspective
The constructive nature of memory, where details can be filled in or altered based on suggestions, inferences, and the incorporation of information encountered after the event, can lead to false memories, the phenomenon of creating convincing recollections of events that never happened. The Wikipedia page on false memories is well worth a read. Suggestibility, coupled with the passage of time, the misattribution of information sources, or strong emotions can cause individuals to believe falsely constructed memories to be, in fact, true.
In therapeutic contexts, the controversy surrounding false memories becomes particularly pronounced. Techniques that encourage the recovery of repressed memories can sometimes lead to the formation of false memories of traumatic events, raising ethical concerns about the methods employed in therapy and their potential impact on individuals.
[n]o psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts and behaviour anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling.
Nicholas Epley – Mindwise
False memories have life-changing consequences regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The Innocence Project notes that of the wrongful convictions they have helped overturn by DNA evidence, 63% involved eyewitness misidentification, with a shattering “3,874 years Innocence Project clients collectively spent wrongfully incarcerated”. The misidentification process often stems from the malleability of human memory, the stress at the time of observation, and suggestive questioning techniques that contaminate eyewitness memories.
Recognizing the shapeable nature of memory should make us acknowledge the brain’s role as a skilled storyteller rather than a faithful historian. And because it takes a storyteller to recognize another storyteller, the “connect-the-dots puzzle” nature of memory was perhaps better understood by Agatha Christie, who, through one of her characters, says:
When we repeat a conversation, we don’t, as a rule, repeat the actual words; we put in some other words that seem to us to mean exactly the same thing.
Miss Marple – The Thumb Mark of St Peter
Another aspect of trying to understand how the brain constructs our sense of reality is an insight provided by Will Storr in his brilliant book The Science of Storytelling. Storr suggests that as the brain tries to build a narrative from all the inputs, memories, behaviors, or events around us, the brain creates a voice. We all hear that voice, the narrator’s voice. You can listen to it now, reading this text to you, commenting, connecting ideas, and creating assertions. Because of the natural tendency of the narrator’s voice towards world-building, we are especially affected when consuming information.
Whenever we find out a new piece of information, we tend to judge it. If it is consistent with our world model, we are inclined to accept it. If it is inconsistent, then we are tempted to refuse it. No wonder we create our echo chambers, surrounding ourselves with news and views that reinforce what we already know and believe. By strengthening echo chamber facts, the brain tries to reduce the threat of change, the stress, and the unpleasantness of different opinions and models.
We ignore, forget, or attempt to actively discredit information that is inconsistent with our models.
Bruce Wexler – Brain and Culture
Our understanding of the world and ourselves is predominantly narrative-driven and constructed from bits and bobs. These stories might not always be perfectly accurate reflections of the external reality, but they are essential for making sense of our place in the world. Thus, reality can be viewed as a complex internal construct influenced by our perceptions, memories, biases, and the brain’s inherent need to find patterns and bring some sense of order into the chaos of endless input information.
There are many ways we prefer to look at things. But one must actually take facts as they are, must one not?
Miss Marple – The Murder at The Vicarage
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