Derek Thompson

However, your conscious attention can only process 50 bits of information.

That's the equivalent of one sentence per second.

So that means that you are only consciously aware of .000045% of reality entering your brain.

How does the brain filter this out?

How does it make sense of reality when there's just too much information to process?

Well, it predicts reality.

We all live in a simulation inside our own minds.

And so we don't see reality as it is.

We see reality through this tiny pinhole of attention.

And so we don't see it clearly because our reality is filtered based on our beliefs.

And we see this study after study after study shows how people can observe the same exact reality and yet see something completely different.

There's an illusion called the coffer illusion.

I can show you this image and based on where you were born, you will either see squares or circles.

I can, if you're on a diet, you see food as larger.

If you are afraid of heights, you see distances as further.

We've all experienced watching a football game and the ref makes a call and people on one side who back one team see the call as absolutely correct.

People on the other team see the call as ridiculous, that the ref must be blind, right?

Think about in geopolitics, how no matter what happens, people who are committed, who have a belief that one side is right and one side is wrong, they see every event through that lens.

We do not see reality clearly.

We do not see people clearly.