- 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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인간의 경험이 객관적인 현실과 일치하는지에 대한 토론.

인간의 경험은 감각 입력과 뇌의 해석에 의해 형성됩니다.

어두운 상자(두개골)에 갇힌 뇌의 은유.

뇌는 감각 결과를 받아들이고 원인을 추론합니다(역추론 문제).

뇌는 과거 경험을 통해 감각 입력의 원인을 추측합니다.

두뇌의 예측 모델과 카테고리 생성

뇌는 세상이 아닌 신체의 모델을 만듭니다.

뇌는 유사한 과거 사례의 범주를 사용하여 미래의 사건을 예측합니다.

카테고리는 감각적 특징 또는 추상적이고 기능적인 특징을 기반으로 할 수 있습니다.

추상적인 카테고리는 뇌에만 존재합니다.

인간은 사물에 집합적으로 기능을 부여함으로써 사회적 현실을 창조합니다.

많은 심리적 범주는 사회적 현실의 한 형태입니다.

예: 찡그린 얼굴에 부여된 의미.

상상력과 내부와 외부 현실 사이의 균형

뇌의 상상력은 새로운 경험을 창조할 수 있게 해줍니다.

상상력은 양날의 검과 같아서 때때로 현재에 집중하기 어렵게 만들기도 합니다.

내부 포커스와 외부 포커스 사이의 균형 조절의 중요성.