Is Reality Even Real? Part 2 | Self-Deception, Consciousness & Objective Truth
episode
Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
49 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is 'reality vertigo' and why does self-deception feel like truth?
Self-deception occurs when an interpretation becomes familiar, so emotionally convincing, and so constantly reinforced that it doesn't feel like an interpretation at all. It feels like the truth. And it is extraordinarily difficult to separate yourself from when you're inside of the system. If our perception is constructed, emotions influence our interpretation, memory is reconstructed, If attention is selective and if self-deception can be indistinguishable from reality itself, how do I even know what's real? Mind mouth. This is the moment that we call reality vertigo. And I do not think you can get to a healed state without facing this head on.
Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?
Hey, everyone. We are back with part two of Is Reality Even Real? Before you watch this episode, you have to go watch the one before it. So if you didn't watch part one of Is Reality Even Real? Don't watch me. Just turn me off. Go back to the other one or pause me. Don't listen to me, whether you're watching or listening. Just go back. Trust me. Because I'm quite literally picking up where I left off on the last one. I'm not going to go back and fill in any gaps. I'm not going to bring you along for the ride. So just do us all a favor. Go back and listen to the one right before it. You're welcome. We were talking at the end of our last episode about how things like color and sound are processed by our brain and they aren't as objectively real as we want to believe they are.
So we've uncovered something fairly remarkable. Color isn't. There isn't one way to perceive color. It's actually something that is quite literally constructed. And similarly, touch is also something that's constructed. A great example of this would be tickling to one person might feel one way, and that same exact physical touch might register as something very different to somebody else. Those of you that have ever taken break method, you know how I personally feel about tickling. But because of this particular trigger for me, I'm actually not ticklish. I have rewired my response to tickling so I could quite literally be tickled and feel nothing. Is it a form of dissociation? Yeah, probably. But nonetheless, I've rewired my response to tickling.
So the same exact touch to one person might make them giggle. Hey, maybe even pee themselves. But me, I would be totally deadpan. similarly and in the same vein is pain. Pain is something that is highly constructed by a person and their brain pattern type. In last episode, we talked about how your early childhood experiences around how your parents engaged your pain inform how much pain you feel later. I have the data to show that parents who coddled pain and sickness those particular people, as they age, experience more pain. Those of us whose parents didn't coddle them, we've found that experiencing pain doesn't get us anything positive, so a lot of times we detach from it and we ignore it. So another way to wrap this all up with a bow is to say that our awareness emerges through layers of interpretation and that it is not based on anything objective.
Add on top of this predictive processing, and we arrive at a realization that can feel fascinating, but also wildly unsettling. So this naturally raises a pretty big question. If reality passes through so many layers of interpretation before it actually reaches your awareness, why do we feel so certain about what we're perceiving and it feeling objective? Why do two people look at the same exact situation and become convinced that their interpretation is the correct one? The answer has everything to do with attention. Every second of every day, your brain is receiving an overwhelming amount of incoming information. The visual system alone takes in vastly more data than you could even consciously process.
In fact, some studies have concluded that we may process up to 90 to 99% of information and filter it out of our awareness.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is 'reality vertigo' and why does self-deception feel like truth?
0:00–16:25
2
How do attention and the Reticular Activating System (RAS) shape what we notice?
16:25–30:49
3
What role does the salience network and emotion play in deciding what matters?
30:49–38:53
4
Why is memory reconstruction fallible and how does it distort events?
38:53–49:32