Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You don't see the world with your eyes. You see the world with your brain.
Chapter 2: How does the brain construct reality?
Your thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, your past, it's all a construction that's happening inside of a black box. And that black box is our skull. I didn't used to believe in the power of the mind. I didn't used to believe in any of this. I grew up with so many different health issues and doctors were never really able to help the people that I loved or me.
Everything that I talk about is everything that I needed to hear and that I've personally used to change my life. They raise newborn kittens in complete darkness except for a few hours each day in cylinders painted with only horizontal or only vertical black and white stripes.
After that critical period, the kittens that were raised to only ever see these horizontal stripes, they did not respond to vertically oriented objects. It could be right in front of my face and I wouldn't even notice it. Where am I the kitten in my own life?
We're fed by this society that your worth really is and how much output you have, how much performance you have.
Chapter 3: What role does neuroplasticity play in personal transformation?
When it becomes your entire identity and it's entangled in your work, it becomes very painful. Your sense of worthiness completely resides on performance. But when you realize that your brain is constructing your entire experience of reality, it's actually quite empowering because
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today holds two degrees in neuroscience. She has one of the fastest growing science accounts on social media, and she really leverages neuroscience tips and tools to increase well-being in everyday life. Emily McDonald, thanks for being here.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Default Mode Network in self-concept?
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited for this.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to meet you.
Chapter 5: How can we integrate science and spirituality in our lives?
Nice to meet you too.
I want to start actually kind of at the deep end. I think that for people that listen to podcasts like mine and work like yours, they're pursuing betterment of their lives to some degree. And I think one doorway into that is to first examine how malleable your reality is and how much you construct it internally.
And so I want to start with how your brain constructs reality to kind of open in the door of... who we are and the life that we create.
Chapter 6: How does identity influence our perception of abundance?
So when I say the term, your brain constructs your reality, what comes to mind?
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.
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Chapter 7: Why is processing time essential for mental well-being?
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.
Chapter 8: What are effective strategies for habit change?
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. These were real monkeys in the rainforest. And we knew the genotypes of these monkeys, and we could map on a color plot how these different monkeys would perceive different colored fruits in the rainforest.
It would be the same fruit. You'd take the illuminance, the reflectance of the color of the fruit, and you could put it through what they actually call a quantum catch, which is funny because you're mentioning the word quantum earlier. Um, but yeah, it was called a quantum catch and it's just a way to kind of do these measurements.
And you could then see on a color plot how this same colored fruit is perceived differently, like different shades of color. And I remember that really kind of opening the doorway for me. I mean, like, whoa, you know, you look out here and you think to yourself, uh, I'm seeing, you know, the ground or seeing you the same way somebody else might see you, but that's not actually the case at all.
And I remember I've been in discussions before with, you know, even my fiance where it's like, this shirt is pink. It's like, I don't know. I don't really see it as that color. But now I know it's like, no, actually, his brain's just constructing it wrong. And it's mine that's constructing it right. But we all perceive it differently, right?
And I think it's so interesting to kind of explore that and explore, you know, I don't think that we're meant to see reality the same because we're all kind of meant to have these different perspectives and make the world a more interesting place that way. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a deep rabbit hole that we can go down when thinking about that, but...
I mean, that's just vision that I explained. But I remember there was another study that we kind of dove into. This was actually in my PhD because we had different kind of specialists come in and teach us about different sensory systems.
And specifically, the taste one kind of sticks with me because there was this study or this experiment where it's called like the bitter tea experiment, where they would have these mice kind of drink this tea that was very bitter and they wouldn't drink it.
Well, I like this tea, actually. I love green tea.
But yeah, exactly. And so they wouldn't drink it, right, because it was bitter. So they wouldn't drink it. But what they would do then is they actually kind of made this genetic switch where they didn't change the taste buds in these mice tongues. What they changed was the wiring, the path from the taste bud to kind of the area in the brain where we decipher taste.
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