Emily McDonald

So, yeah, I mean, the brain constructing reality is so interesting and so cool.

And it really is the first thing that kind of made me realize, whoa, if the brain is constructing something as simple as color, how else is my sort of experience being, you know—

determined by my brain.

And there's, I mean, the one last study I can share with you that I think that you maybe were thinking about when you asked this question was the kitten experiment.

And I remember when I was learning about the kitten experiment for the first time, and basically what they did was they took newborn kittens

and they raised them in complete darkness, except for a few hours each day where they would put them in cylinders.

And these cylinders were either painted with only vertical black and white stripes or only horizontal black and white stripes.

And they did this throughout the critical period of development of their visual system.

And after that critical period, they put them into a normal environment.

And what they found was that the kittens that were raised to only ever see these horizontal stripes, they did not respond normally to vertically oriented objects.

So like table legs, chair legs, they did not respond.

They even had the experimenters take a vertical rod and wave it in front of their face, and they didn't respond to it.

And it was the exact opposite for the kittens that had only ever seen the vertical stripes.

They could...

perceive the vertical objects like the table legs, but they wouldn't get up and perch on horizontal ledges and they wouldn't respond normally to horizontal oriented objects.

And so I remember learning about that experiment.

And again, it's just kind of, you know, the vision system and the taste and all of our senses, that's kind of the micro level.

But then when you think about the kitten experiment, this is sort of the macro level of how our programming is actually shaping our reality.

And when I learned about that, I was like, whoa, where am I the kitten in my own life?

And I ask myself this all the time, like every time I want to level up or I have a new goal, like, okay, like where am I the kitten right now?