The Brain's Role in Shaping Social Reality and Experience

The brain's predictive power allows imagination to shape reality, blending past experiences with present perceptions.

### Understanding Reality: The Brain's Role in Perception and Social Constructs
* 🧠 Philosophers have long debated whether human experience aligns with objective reality, and the consensus is that "**Not exactly**" does apply, as our perception is influenced by **sensory signals and brain processing**.
* 🔍 Our brains operate within a "**dark, silent box**" (the skull) and rely on sensory input to infer the external world's happenings, which leads to the '**Reverse inference problem**' where effects are known, but causes must be guessed.
* 💥 For instance, a loud bang could stem from various sources, and the brain's response varies depending on the inferred cause, emphasizing the **importance of accurate predictions for survival**.
* 📊 The brain creates categories from past experiences to make predictions about future occurrences, utilizing **features of similarity** to determine **actions and expectations**.
* 🍏 These categories can be based on sensory attributes, like the **physical properties of apples**, or abstract features, such as their **suitability for baking**, highlighting the brain's capacity for **complex categorization**.
* 💵 Social constructs, like money, emerge when we collectively **assign functions to objects that do not inherently possess them**, illustrating how our brains **shape social reality**.
* 🌍 Additionally, we can create societal structures, such as countries and governments, based on **shared agreements**, further showcasing the brain's role in **defining social categories**.
* ✨ Ultimately, while our brains are confined within their skulls, they possess the remarkable ability to **imagine and create new experiences**, which can sometimes lead to challenges in **remaining present in the moment**.

- Sometimes people wanna say, "No, we definitely don't experience reality the way that it actually is." And some people wanna say, "Yes, we do." Philosophers have been arguing about this for like as long as philosophy has existed:

The question of does your experience match reality, or are you really experiencing reality in its stark, objective truth? And the answer is simply: "Not exactly." Reality, for us, is what we can sense with our sensory surfaces, and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain.

The signals in our brain are as necessary for our experience of reality as the sensory signals that come from the world. So, I'm gonna use a metaphor to describe how the brain works. It goes something like this: Your brain, my brain, everybody's brain,

is trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull. And the brain has no knowledge of what is going on around it in the world or in the body, right? Because it's in this skull, and it's receiving sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of your body.

These signals are the outcomes of some changes in the world or in the body - but the brain doesn't know what the changes are, it's receiving the outcomes. And that is what philosophers and scientists call the 'Reverse inference problem.'

You start with an outcome, and you have to guess at the cause. For example, if you hear a loud bang, it could be a car backfiring, a door slamming, it could be a gunshot. Your brain doesn't know what the causes are,

It only knows the effect, and so, it has to guess. And the guess is important, right? Because you would do different
things if it's a gunshot versus if it's a windy
day that slammed a door. And luckily, it has one
other source of information,

and that is your past experience. The really cool thing about this—if that wasn't cool enough—is that it's actually
doing it predictively. Sometimes scientists talk about this as the brain running a model of the world, but the brain is not running
a model of the world;

the brain is running a model of its body, and it's doing it in this
really interesting way. In psychology, a group of instances which are
similar is called a category. In essence, what your brain is doing, when it's making a prediction,

it's creating a category
of instances from the past which are similar in
some way to the present, in order to predict what's
going to happen next, what the brain has to do next, and what your experience will be next.

And so, when a human brain is creating a category, you have to ask, "What features
of similarity is it using?" Is it these sensory and motor features? An apple is round. An apple is hard and crunchy. Or is it these abstract features;

abstract, multimodal summaries
of patterns of features. I could take a bunch of apples and I could say, "Well,
these are good for baking, and these are not good for baking." And these patterns, this summary,
only exists in your brain.

Because our brains are structured to construct categories based on the function of things rather than what they look like, or taste like, or smell like, humans can create something called 'Social reality,' which is where we collectively impose a function on objects

that the objects don't have by virtue of their physical nature. So, a really good example of this is money - little pieces of paper. We all agree that these little pieces of paper have a function of value. And it turns out that many things that we think of

as being part of reality are actually like this. We can draw lines in the sand and create the borders of countries, which creates categories of people called immigrants and citizens. We can create governments because we all agree that certain actions like making little tick marks

has a meaning to elect someone into a position that has certain powers - it's a form of social reality. In our lab, we work on the hypothesis that many psychological categories are forms of social reality. We impose a meaning on a scowling face

that it did not evolve to have, but because we all agree that it has that meaning or that function in a particular culture, then it does. To say that your brain resides in a dark, silent box doesn't mean that you are trapped in that box.

Your brain has this wonderful capacity to take bits and pieces of past experience and create something completely new that you've never experienced before. We call it imagination. That's a double-edged sword, right? Because our brains are so good at imagining

and creating predictions that are not yoked to our
immediate surroundings, sometimes we have a lot of
trouble staying in the present. You have to practice
your ability to control how much you want to be constrained by what's going on outside that box-

Your brain doesn’t detect reality. It creates it. | Lisa Feldman Barrett

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The nature of reality and human perception

Debate on whether human experience matches objective reality.

Human experience is shaped by sensory input and brain interpretation.

Metaphor of the brain trapped in a dark box (skull).

The brain receives sensory outcomes and infers causes (reverse inference problem).

The brain uses past experience to guess the cause of sensory input.

The brain's predictive model and category creation

The brain creates a model of the body, not the world.

The brain uses categories of similar past instances to predict future events.

Categories can be based on sensory features or abstract, functional features.

Abstract categories exist only in the brain.

Humans create social reality by collectively imposing functions on objects.

Many psychological categories are forms of social reality.

Example: the meaning imposed on a scowling face.

Imagination and the balance between internal and external reality

The brain's capacity for imagination allows creation of novel experiences.

Imagination is a double-edged sword, sometimes causing difficulty staying present.

Importance of controlling the balance between internal and external focus.