Emily McDonald

But when you realize that your brain is constructing your entire experience of reality, it's actually quite empowering because

Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited for this.

Nice to meet you too.

I love that you say diving straight into the deep end.

This was actually kind of the thing that opened the doorway for me into knowing myself, knowing life, building the life that I want.

And it was because that's one of the first things you learn about when I was getting my first degree in neuroscience is sort of how your brain constructs reality.

And

The first thing that comes to mind for me was, I remember when I first heard the phrase, you don't see the world with your eyes, you see the world with your brain.

All your eyes do is take in light signals, and then those light signals travel through the brain where your thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs pass.

Your past is all incorporated before the image is even put together that you see, right?

So you're not experiencing, a lot of times we feel like we are kind of experiencing this outside world, but really what we are experiencing is a construction that's happening inside of a black box.

And that black box is our skull.

And so we don't actually have like an experience of what's really out there.

We have an experience of what our brain is constructing.

And it uses information through our five senses, but also through our past, our memories, our programming, our identity.

And I remember when I was getting my first degree, I was working in a vision lab where I specifically was just doing data analysis.

That was my job, but it was about color vision.

And my job was to kind of run all this code and then map on a color plot.

how different individuals, in this case, it was monkeys in the rainforest, like this lab actually had people go out.