3 All-Important Reasons Your Brain Cannot Be Trusted

“We don’t see the world as IT is. We see the world as WE are.” ~ The Talmud

In her recent book, 7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain, Harvard Medical School researcher, Lisa Feldman Barrett recounts the story of a conscripted Rhodesian soldier who happened upon enemy guerilla fighters in camoflage uniforms carrying AK-47 assault rifles. He took careful aim at the leader and was just about to shoot, when a fellow soldier stopped him. “It’s just a boy herding cows on the path,” his comrade said. The soldier blinked and stared, and indeed the guerilla fighters were something his brain and nervous system had hallucinated in the stress of the moment. Here’s how Dr. Barrett explains the incident:

“From the moment you’re born to the moment you draw your last breath, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box called your skull. Day in and day out, it continually receives sense data from the outside world via your eyes, ears, nose and other sensory organs. This data does not arrive in the form of meaningful sights, smells, sounds, and other sensations that most of us experience. It’s just a barrage of light waves, chemicals and changes in air pressure with no inherent significance.

“How does your brain conjure high-fidelity experiences like guerrilla fighters in the forest, out of scraps of raw data from the outside world? How does it create feelings of terror from a thundering heart? Your brain recreates the past from memory by asking itself, The last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state and was preparing this particular action, what did I see next? What did I feel next? The answer becomes your experience” (pg. 67). The lesson: Great stress can often produce tragic hallucinations.

Telephone Game Brain

I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when a friend or my wife will correct or comment on an experience we’ve had together that actually didn’t take place the way I recounted it. When they deliver their recollection, more often than not I discover that our blended experience more closely resembles my actual experience. As research from the lab of Ken Paller at Northwestern University points out – memories are like the Telephone Game – each time we access a memory, the brain goes about revising it. Depending upon our stress levels and the context within which a memory is being recalled, an account can radically change over time. As you might guess, this brain operation causes victims of trauma great stress as different versions of the incident can play out over time, not because of error or because of lying or deceit, but because of neuro-revisioning. Many an account by rape and assault victims has been discounted and dismissed precisely because of this memory revision process that goes on constantly in everyone’s brain, tending to make testimony seem less credible.

The Blind Not Seeing the Blind

The brain’s network processing resources are limited. Where it can conserve energy, it does, using schemas to focus on what matters most. These schematic shortcuts can result in Inattentional Blindness – we are so focused on the 100 year old cedar tree in front of us, that the forest literally goes unnoticed. Perhaps the most famous example of Inattentional Blindness is the Invisible Gorilla experiment carried out by Dan Simons and Chris Chabris. Because subjects in the experiment were so focused on ball passes and player uniform colors, many completely missed the gorilla who came dancing across the screen in the middle of the video.

Here are some everyday examples of Inattentional Blindness from VeryWellMind:

• Even though you think you are paying attention to the road, you fail to notice a car swerve into your lane of traffic, resulting in a traffic accident.
• You are watching a historical drama set in ancient Greece. You don’t notice a major blooper in which an airplane appears in the background of a pivotal scene.
• You decide to make a phone call while driving through busy traffic. You fail to notice that the traffic light has turned red, so you run the stop light and end up getting a traffic ticket.
• While playing a video game, you are so intently focused on spotting a specific type of “bad guy” that you completely miss another threat to your character and end up losing the game.

These are just a few of the ways the brain can operate in matters that can result in great suffering. For me the primary takeaway from this information is that we are each walking through the world with neurobiological resources that, depending upon a whole host of untold factors, can undo us at any time. Best to exercise and express as much humility and appreciation as we can for when things go well.