The mind-blowing science behind how our brains shape reality
Curated from: sciencefocus.com
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The Superhuman Power Of The Brain
A simple look at our brain, we would see a blob of jiggly meat, however, this blob of jiggly meat is extremely powerful. Through years of evolution, our brains are responsible for conjuring our pasts and predicting our futures, control our bodies, and create our experiences in the past and the present.
Our brains can also modify our physical reality through a social reality where we can make up something out of nothing and convince other people to treat it as real.
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Reverse Inference Problem
Our brains rely on memories when faced with ambiguous data whereas it guesses the causes of the data received as it plans what to do next in order to keep us alive and well.
An esteemed neuroscientist described our daily experience as "the remembered present" where our brains will constantly and invisibly guess future actions based on memories that are similar to the present moment. Our brain's guesses, may they be right or wrong, manifests as our actions and senses.
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Social Reality
Our brains can actually consider physical objects and impose new or different functions on it even if it is not a part of its physical nature, using only our collective minds. This phenomenon is called social reality.
It has an amazing level of influence on our lives, not only on an individual level but the effects can be felt globally. Where we believe a certain stereotype, soon it creates a self-fulling prophecy which perpetuates the stereotype in a vicious cycle.
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Abstract Categories
The brain makes categories based on context. Say an elephant, a fountain, and a water gun are all three different objects, however, the brain can categorize them as "objects that can shoot water."
The categories made by the brain are extremely flexible and are what drives many of our actions and experiences. this is also the engine behind social reality because when we share such categorizations and make them real it is able to influence people as well as our genetic evolution as a species.
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"We have more control over reality than we might think, and more responsibility for reality than we might realize or want".
LISA FELDMAN-BARRETT
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