Can you trust your own brain? A neuroscientist explains | Heather Berlin

• So we're all living inside of our own Perception Box. It's dark in there. It doesn't actually see or hear anything. It's just a series of signals, and each brain, you can think of it like a thumbprint. Physically speaking, each brain is unique. It's slightly different, and it's shaped throughout our lives based on our experiences.

Our perceptions are basically formed from a combination of what we expect, so that's coming internally from our past experiences, and then what's coming into our brain externally. And when those two things meet, it creates this perception, which is what we actually experience. But everyone's perception is unique, and we can never know what it would feel like to be you, for example: Only you know your own first-person subjective experience. I can never know it.

And although we might have similarities, there's also these differences that create our own box that we perceive the world through. I've always been fascinated about the relationship between the physical brain and the mind. My big question was trying to understand the neural basis of our conscious perception.

So everything we experience from the moment we wake up to when we go back into a deep dreamless sleep, how does the brain create these subjective experiences that we have? Our feelings, our thoughts, emotions. Our minds are shaped by our prior experience. So as these neurons start forming connections, and as you go through life and have experiences, it's a pruning process.

So it's actually strengthening the important connections, and allowing the other unimportant connections to kind of wither away. And then you start to develop a more defined structure. Our perception of the world around us is a construct of the mind. It's an illusion in the sense that it's created by the mind, but there are things that actually exist out there in the world, but we're just not actually seeing all of it.

So if you think of attention, it's like a spotlight. And so you can focus that spotlight anywhere in the visual field, let's say, or even auditorily, right? You can think of a cocktail party. You can tune into some conversation over there and not be listening to what's right in front of you.

So things could be happening right in front of your face, but if your spotlight of attention is not there—your brain might be processing it in some way, but you're not consciously aware of it. You become aware of it when it becomes important. There's this constant interplay between things that our brain processes unconsciously that informs our behavior.

So what you're conscious of at any moment can affect what you perceive and what you remember as well. So if you're in a negative headspace, you're gonna start perceiving more negative things in your environment. If you're in a positive headspace, you're gonna perceive more positive things, even though the environment may be exactly the same.

You can choose where you attend to internally. You can choose to attend to positive thoughts and have them grow within you, rather than focusing your attention on negative thoughts. So being mindful is your brain controlling what you're attending to, and also controlling what you're taking in—and how you're reacting to the world.

In general, there's so much information coming at our brains throughout the day, if we had to consciously process all of it, it would be overwhelming. It's easier to sort of categorize things. It's easier to perceive things, not just at a basic level, but it scales up to these higher cognitive levels, to belief systems.

And so we developed these schemas, but the problem is that even though on average something might be true, it doesn't mean that it's true for every case. Let's say a bias is that women were homemakers and the men were more in the workplace. If they saw a picture of a man and a woman and you'd say, "Okay, which one is working in the office?" People would more likely say the man because prior expectations.

So there's this balance between having a schema that helps us perceive things in the world—our expectations—and then also not making these over-assumptions. And so cognitive biases can be adaptive up to a certain point. So if you change the inputs enough over time, you change those unconscious biases.

I notice a lot of commercials for laundry detergent and stuff. It's like the man at home doing the housework, you know, which I love because that is reprogramming the brain to kind of counteract those biases. If we can figure out ways to either expand this box that we're living within, we are better able to connect with other perspectives.

The more you can understand, and also knowing that you live within a certain kind of perceptual box can create potentially the impetus for you to develop or try to work on developing more empathy for others who are living inside their own Perception Boxes.

We're all work-in-progress until our very last breath, and there's always room for change. Nothing is set in stone. I've had people come to therapy in their 70s for the first time because they say, you know, "I've been depressed my whole life and I don't wanna die without having experienced joy and happiness."

If you change your perspective, it changes how you experience the world. And life is full of pain, that's part of the journey. But being able to contextualize that and weave it into your life narrative is something we can all do.

So knowing that our perception is an illusion, our sense of self is illusion, all of it is an illusion in the sense that it's a construct of our brain; our brain is creating this for us. And given that, that's an opportunity because we can have some control over how our brain perceives the world—and that's where the power lies.