Chapter 3: We Each Experience Our Own Reality

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What if everything you've ever taken for granted about reality, what you see here, even feel, is profoundly different for the person standing right next to you?

Today we're taking a deep dive into this, well, astonishing truth that each of us experiences our own unique world.

And here's the powerful part.

Understanding this can actually empower us to shape our own reality.

To really get a handle on this, let's maybe cast our minds back to 2015.

Do you remember hashtag the dress?

It was this blurry photo.

You have a dress that completely marked the internet, sparking this like furious debate.

Was it white with gold lace or blue with black lace?

If you need a reminder, maybe go ahead and Google it.

Or even better, ask your own friends and family what they see.

The sheer difference in perception is truly striking.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And it's not just a fun optical illusion, you know, like those pictures where you can consciously flip between seeing, say, a rabbit or a duck.

With hashtag the dress, many people genuinely insisted they saw it one way or the other, like unambiguously.

This phenomenon perfectly illustrates an ancient philosophical observation from Boethius, who said something like,

things are known not according to their natures, but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them.

Oh,

so this really sets the stage for our exploration into what's called phenomenology, basically, the study of how we experience reality, not just how it objectively is.

Right.

And while it might seem like a fun party trick, our deep dive today will go well, far beyond that.

We're going to explore the profound and sometimes maybe challenging implications of this truth for how we understand ourselves and everyone around us.

So these wildly differing perceptions aren't just random, are they?

It seems they're actually deeply rooted in our biology and our unique life experiences.

How does that even begin?

It's absolutely fundamental.

Yeah.

Take color perception, for example.

Science tells us that color isn't an objective property just sitting there in the dress itself.

Instead, your brain literally constructs the color you see.

Think of it this way.

Light reflects off the dress.

It enters your eye.

Different light wavelengths get picked up by specialized cells.

But here's the key part.

Your brain then interprets that raw data based on a lifetime of assumptions it's built, assumptions about how light behaves in your world.

It makes an educated guess about the ambient brightness, like is the dress in shadow or bright sunlight?

And then boom, without you even realizing it, it computes the color for you.

This is why the same dress can appear totally different to people standing side by side.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant, he talked about dust, ding, and thing in itself,

suggesting that, well, we can never truly perceive reality as it is, only our brain's interpretation of it.

Wow.

So it's not just color then, is it?

This goes much deeper.

It suggests that our entire reality is, in a way, custom made for each of us, a sort of bespoke reality.

What are the layers that build this unique world for every single individual?

Well, it's mind boggling when you really start digging into it.

Our diversity as humans begins at the most fundamental level, our genes.

Unlike, say, a perfect digital copy,

our genetic code is subject to tiny variations,

mutations, copying errors, as it passes from parents to offspring.

And then there's the genetic lottery, right?

You inherit a unique mix from each parent, like shuffling two decks of cards together.

So we each carry our own slightly unique instruction for building a human.

This genetic diversity, by the way, it's crucial.

It's a feature, not a bug for evolution.

It's what drives it.

Then these genetic blueprints are profoundly shaped by what we experience.

Things like, well, something as dramatic as a period of severe malnutrition, even in a previous generation, can leave a lasting mark.

That's through a process called epigenetics.

And then on a daily basis, our brains are constantly changing.

This is neuroplasticity.

The brain's continuous ability to rewire itself.

We're not really forming many new neurons after birth, but our brains are constantly strengthening or weakening the connections, the synapses between existing nerve cells.

Think of it like adjusting the volume on, I don't know, thousands of tiny speakers in this vast network.

This is how we learn a language, Mandarin or English, pick up cultural attitudes, collectivism or individualism, or form memories of events.

It's even the basic principle behind how powerful AI systems like chat pt learn, adjusting those connection weights.

Imagine your young brain is this super absorbent sponge.

It just soaks up conscious and unconscious rules and biases, biases about how the world works, but who is in and who is out, about what's good or bad, sexism, racism, all kinds of discrimination.

They become what we call priors, essentially, your brain's ingrained default settings or preset assumptions about reality.

They're shaped by your early childhood experiences, and they profoundly shape how you respond to everything from a new sound to a new person determines your view of physical and social reality.

And while your brain stays adaptable throughout life, this neuroplasticity does tend to decline with age.

Brains get more crystalline kind of set in their ways.

The old, you can't teach an old dog new tricks idea.

Exactly.

And it's interesting, chronic stress or depression can actually blunt this adaptability while certain psychedelic experiences seem to temporarily increase it.

So if I'm following this, we often assume there's a kind of standard human brain, maybe like a default setting.

But what you're saying is that's not really true.

There's actually this vast genetic and developmental diversity among the, what, eight billion people on earth, resulting in this astonishing variety of perceptions.

So there isn't really a standard brain at all.

Yeah, exactly.

It's truly incredible when you look at the range.

Let's stick with color for just a moment longer.

Most of us see a rich spectrum using three types of color sensing cells in our eyes, Twichromats.

But some women, interestingly, actually have a fourth type of cell.

They're Tetrachromats.

They can perceive subtle hues that are completely invisible to the rest of us.

It's like seeing extra colors.

On the other hand, about one in 14 men have only two types of these cells.

They're Dichromats, often mislabeled colorblind.

They see fewer colors, maybe struggle to tell red from yellow.

And then there's a much rarer group, Monochromats, who see only in shades of gray, no color at all.

Think about the fascinating story Oliver Sacks told about Pindulap Atoll near Micronesia.

Centuries ago, a typhoon devastated the island, left a tiny population, and one survivor carried a specific genetic mutation.

Today, about five percent of the islanders have achromatopsia.

They see zero color.

Their world is entirely black, white, and gray.

They actually thrive at night.

Their vision is better in low light, but they're almost blinded by bright daylight.

Imagine trying to explain yellow to someone like this.

It's impossible.

As one achromat researcher, Newton Nordby, wrote in his diary, they called it color.

They refer to things by names which had no meaning for me.

Just wow.

This really highlights the concept of qualia, that unique feels like something quality of an experience.

You can describe the wavelengths of light that make up yellow, sure, but you can't convey the feeling of seeing yellow to someone who has never experienced it.

It's like trying to explain the taste of chocolate to someone who's only ever eaten apples, maybe.

Exactly that kind of gap.

It's subjective.

And this diversity extends far beyond just color vision.

Some people lack binocular depth perception, so they see the world in a flatter way.

Others experience visual snow, like a constant TV static overlay on their vision.

You have people who are face blind, prosopagnosia, literally mistaking their spouse for a stranger sometimes.

And then the opposite.

Super recognizers, who seem to never forget a face they've seen.

Our ability to visualize varies wildly too.

Some people have hyperphantasia,

incredibly that cannot conjure any mental picture at all.

Try asking them to picture an apple, and nothing.

And thinking styles differ too, right?

Some people grasp holistic pictures, others prefer abstract patterns, while many think in very linear ways using words and symbols.

Even our basic physical sensations can be unique.

We all know someone who always feels cold, while someone else is comfortable in shorts in the middle of winter.

Food tastes different to a dish one person finds bland, another finds way too spicy.

Some people lack the ability to taste umami entirely.

Then you get these unique abilities like perfect pitch in music, or that incredible ability some people have like distinguishing Parkinson's patients just by the subtle smell of their skin.

And on the flip side, tragically, some people are born without the capacity to feel pain at all.

It sounds like a blessing, maybe, but it's a profound curse.

They're vulnerable to constant unnoticed injury.

Even things like our inner voice.

Some people have a constant internal monologue, others less so, or the presence of hallucinatory voices.

These things differ.

And think about the huge spectrum of empathy versus psychopathy, or optimism versus pessimism, or the many multiplicities of sexual identities and genders.

All these profoundly affect how we perceive the world and interact with it.

It's really fascinating how these deeply personal ways of perceiving the world influence not just our immediate senses, but also our personality, maybe our choice of profession, even the entire course of our lives.

You mentioned Oliver Sacks earlier.

His lifelong face blindness, you said, made him quite withdrawn and socially shy.

Not because he didn't care, but because recognizing people was just a genuine daily struggle for him.

It's absolutely true.

These variations really do shape who we become.

It's not trivial.

There's even a big citizen science project happening in the UK right now.

I think it's the perception census.

They're trying to map this incredible variety of human experience, how differently we all see and sense things.

The writer Elizabeth R.

Cork uses such a great metaphor for this.

She calls it the perception box.

Yes, it's a powerful image.

She describes it as a box with invisible and unbreakable walls, because ultimately we can only experience what our specific neural circuitry allows us to experience.

These walls then act as the filter through which we interpret everyone and everything around us.

It's a fundamental truth for all sentient beings, really.

Each species is adapted to its own ecological niche, with its own unique perception box tuned to what matters for its survival.

And critically, it's important to understand how profoundly adverse childhood experiences, things like physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or neglect, what they call ACEs, can cast a long shadow.

Research shows the more of these ACEs experiences in childhood, the higher their chances later in life for conditions like obesity, anxiety, addiction, or even a propensity for violence.

All of this can dramatically affect the width or feel of one's perception box, making you feel tighter, more constricted perhaps, or maybe wider and more open, depending on the experiences.

It makes sense.

It's like that deeply ingrained, almost childlike belief we seem to have, that what's true for us must be true for everyone else.

We often only realize our own unique reality when we bump up against these really striking differences in others, right?

Exactly.

We grow up, you know, assuming everyone sees red the way we do, or feels cold the way we do, because we've never known anything else.

It often takes something surprising, maybe a news story like hashtag the dress, or a documentary, or just a deep conversation with a friend, where you realize, wait, you experienced that completely differently for that penny to drop.

And this idea that perception is fundamentally a construction, it aligns perfectly with how modern neuroscience views the brain.

The brain isn't just passively receiving information like a camera.

It's actively making its best guess about what's out there in the world based on ambiguous sensory input and past experience.

This is sometimes called predictive coding or predictive processing.

Your brain is constantly trying to predict what's coming next, sensory -wise, and then updating its predictions based on the new data that comes in.

So it's like a detective.

Kind of, like a sophisticated detective trying to solve a mystery with only incomplete clues, constantly revising the hypothesis.

Consider the lilac chaser visual illusion.

Maybe you've seen it.

You see 12 blurry pink disks arranged in a circle.

One disk blinks off and on, and the next one, and so on around the circle.

This creates the illusion of a single gap, or maybe a hole traveling around the circle.

But here's the weird part.

If you fixate your gaze on the cross in the center for a little while, you'll often see something different.

You might see only a single greenish disk moving around, while the 11 stationary pink disks seem to completely vanish.

Your brain literally makes you see what isn't there at the green disk, and miss what is there at the pink disks.

The vision scientist David Maher put it perfectly.

Perception is the construction of a description.

And this description isn't just about what we see or hear, our external senses, but also our internal world, our interoceptive percepts, our feelings, our fears, our sense of self.

Take the really powerful example of phantom limb pain.

A person, maybe a veteran, who has lost a limb can suffer from undeniable, excruciating pain in the missing limb.

There's no physical injury there anymore, no external stimulus causing it in the traditional sense.

This fundamentally challenges our everyday sort of naive assumption that our internal world directly and accurately maps onto the external one.

Now of course we do share some aspects of reality due to our common evolution, otherwise how could we even agree to cross a busy street safely?

But ultimately, as neuroscience strongly suggests, each nervous system constructs its own description of the world.

That's a truly profound thought though, that we're, in a sense, stuck inside our own reality with shatterproof walls.

But the good news you seem to be offering is that this situation isn't entirely hopeless.

Reality, in some profound way, is malleable.

How can we possibly expand these invisible walls?

Or maybe make them a bit more flexible?

We absolutely can.

That's the empowering part.

We can gain insight into our own limitations, our own biases, our own perception box.

And we can actively work to expand the invisible walls, as you put it.

How?

Well, by reading books that challenge our perspectives, by watching movies or documentaries that expose us to diverse human experiences, by talking honestly with the therapist perhaps, by listening deeply, truly listening to our friends, especially those with different backgrounds, and simply by educating ourselves about how our brains and minds actually work.

Even if you started out with an identical brain to someone else's, say, you or that double twin, your differing life circumstances, and crucially, your conscious choices about what to focus on, what to value, what to honor, and what to neglect.

All of that profoundly influences your ongoing experience of the world.

And one of the most powerful, and maybe often misunderstood, illustrations of this malleability is the placebo effect.

It's something we hear about a lot, but I feel like we rarely truly understand its implications.

The placebo effect is truly fascinating,

and yeah, often misunderstood.

By definition, a placebo is a harmless medicine or procedure.

Could be anything from a sugar pill to a sham surgery, like a fake knee operation.

And it provides a benefit simply by, well, pleasing and calming the patient, as the old definition goes.

These interventions can have physiological effects that defy simple explanation.

In clinical trials, especially for new drugs, controlling for this placebo effect is absolutely standard practice now.

Typically, half the volunteers get the actual treatment being tested, and the other half get an inactive substance, a placebo.

And it's double blind.

Neither the medical staff administering it, nor the subjects know who's getting what.

The treatment's real efficacy is then measured by how much additional benefit it provides over and above what the SIBU group experienced, just from the expectation and ritual of treatment.

Think back to when modern medicine first really took off.

It was often about finding magic bullets for infectious diseases, things like antibiotics for bacterial infections, or vaccines for polio or yellow fever.

These are generally highly specific and remarkably effective.

They target the cause directly.

But this often isn't the case for many medicines prescribed today for the chronic conditions that are prevalent now.

Things like obesity, depression,

anxiety, chronic pain, maybe Alzheimer's disease.

For many of these conditions, the medicines often have frankly minimal specificity, and their effectiveness can be quite modest.

Take depression, for instance.

An absolutely astounding number, maybe 10 % of adults in the industrialized west.

Take SSRI antidepressants like Prozac or Zoloft.

Yet large clinical trials and meta -analyses consistently show that on average, SSRIs are persistent statistical benefit for the group as a whole compared to placebo.

But for any one individual patient, it's often really unclear how much of their improvement is due to the drug's specific chemical action versus the powerful placebo effect.

And these drugs aren't without downsides either.

Not at all.

They often come with significant side effects, things like sexual dysfunction, emotional blunting, weight gain, and sometimes can lead to lifelong dependency.

So that's the sort of hard truth based on the evidence.

Here's the really remarkable part, the flip side of that coin.

For conditions like depression, something like four -fifths, 80 % of the overall positive response seen in drug trials is actually duplicated by the placebo.

80%.

That's huge.

It's huge.

What this strongly suggests is that the patient's expectation and belief, their belief that they're receiving an effective drug may be prescribed by an expert they trust, validated by scientific research, that expectation often has a significantly influence on their symptoms than the actual SSRI molecule itself.

This is just astounding, right?

It suggests your conscious belief, your mindset, can directly influence your body's chemistry and how you feel.

And we see this play out in various ways in studies.

Giving more placebo pills often works better than giving fewer.

Placebo injections are often perceived as more potent than placebo pulls.

And getting that placebo from a trusted Dr.

So -and -so figure in a white coat, someone who seems knowledgeable and caring, often boosts the effect even more.

This really highlights the crucial role that expectation plays in how our brains learn and respond, especially concerning cues and rewards.

If you expect relief from a pill, maybe because a similar pill helped before, or because the doctor was very convincing, your body can actually recruit its own natural pain relievers, these opioid -like chemicals called endorphins.

There's this compelling anecdote from World War II.

In a besieged Berlin hospital bunker, the surgeons ran out of morphine for the wounded soldiers.

So in desperation, they started giving injections of simple saline solution, just salt water, telling the soldiers it was a powerful painkiller.

And reportedly, it often provided significant pain relief.

The expectation did the work.

It is.

And the placebo effect isn't just limited to pain or depression.

Studies show it works for motor symptoms and Parkinson's disease.

It can influence immune responses, allergies, all sorts of things.

It's clearly a powerful, built -in mechanism for self -regulation, a biological manifestation of belief.

And it arguably powers much of alternative medicine and many cultural healing rituals, like acupuncture or faith healing, where the ritual and belief are central.

And of course, there's the dark side, the flip side, the nocebo response.

Negative expectations can lead to worse outcomes.

If you believe a treatment will have nasty side effects, you're more likely to experience them.

If you believe something will hurt, it's more likely to actually cause you pain.

This can even be linked to broader societal issues, situations where, for example, a historical or ongoing distrust in the medical system, perhaps due to experiences of racism or inequality,

might unfortunately make interventions less effective for certain groups because the expectation isn't positive.

So, both the placebo and nocebo responses are these powerful, though still, frankly, ill -understood biopsychosociological phenomena.

They channel our expectations, our beliefs, our fears into real, measurable physical changes within our bodies, affecting our heart rate, our gut function, our hormone levels, and more.

They're challenging to study rigorously, partly because modern research ethics rightly require researchers to disclose to participants that they might receive a fake pill or treatment, which itself can influence expectations.

This whole discussion really leads us into another, well, very challenging area that often sparks intense debate.

What are sometimes called psychosomatic or psychogenic disorders?

Indeed, and it is a sensitive area.

These are conditions often characterized by shape -shifting or fluctuating symptoms, things like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, psychogenic non -epileptic seizures, maybe even Havana syndrome, resignation syndrome in some refugee children.

They often lack clear, agreed -upon organic pathology, like a specific virus or lesion, and there aren't always objective markers that doctors can easily point to on a test, but let's be absolutely clear that patients indubitably suffer.

This is not imagined pain or fatigue or discomfort.

It's very real to them.

However, the exact role of the conscious or unconscious mind and how factors like chronic stress, trauma, or anxiety might interact with the body to produce or maintain these symptoms remains quite controversial.

Patients often react with understandable frustration, even anger, when psychosomatic causes are suggested.

It can feel like they're being told it's all in their head, or worse, that they're somehow choosing to be sick, which is almost never the case.

Yeah, I can see how that would feel dismissive.

Absolutely.

So they often prefer to seek a clear physical cause, an external agent, a toxin, maybe nerve gas or sonic weapons in the case of Havana syndrome, because that feels more validating, more real, perhaps, than considering the possibility that it's the body's complex, learned reaction to something like chronic anxiety or past trauma, maybe leaving behind a

overreactive nervous system.

This strong reaction against psychosomatic explanations often stems, I think, from a somewhat simplistic, outdated view of the mind and body.

The old brain is hardware, mind is software analogy.

So the thinking goes, if doctors can't find anything wrong with the hardware, the physical brain or body, then the software of the mind must be malfunctioning, which can feel like a personal failing or an accusation.

But in reality, the interaction between the brain, the mind, and our physical and social environments is vastly more complex, more intertwined than that simple hardware -software distinction allows.

A deeply learned interaction.

What is undeniably true, though, in both sickness and in health, is that your conscious attitude and the narrative you construct about your situation play a major, major role in your experience.

It profoundly matters whether you see yourself primarily as a helpless victim of circumstances or unknown forces, or whether you see yourself an autonomous agent, someone capable of shaping your response and finding meaning even in the face of adversity.

The classic glass half empty versus glass half full idea.

Exactly.

Or think about this.

When I moved years ago from sunny Southern California to the often gray and rainy Pacific Northwest, I made a conscious decision.

I decided I would never complain about the gloom.

I actively adopted the maxim often attributed to Scandinavians.

There is no bad weather.

There's only bad clothing and bad attitude.

And you know what?

That conscious choice, that reframing made all the difference in my experienced reality of the weather here.

And that brings us right back around, doesn't it?

Highlighting this incredible, almost, well, astonishing power we have in consciously authoring our own narrative, our own experience.

It absolutely does.

It reminds me of Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.

He wrote so profoundly about this in his book, Man's Search for Meaning.

He observed that even in the most dehumanizing circumstances imaginable, inmates still retained a final freedom.

The freedom to choose how to interpret their terrible situation, how to respond to their suffering.

They could choose to find meaning in their suffering.

What the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus called the last freedom.

Frankl believed this internal choice, this fighting spirit to find meaning, is what enabled some people to survive against all odds.

Similarly, think about Albert Camus wrestling with the absurd in the myth of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus is condemned to eternally push a boulder uphill only for it to roll down again, a seemingly meaningless task.

But Camus comes to this profound conclusion.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Finding meaning and purpose in the struggle itself.

This is the power of conscious belief, of attitude, to effect change.

It's about reframing your situation, reclaiming your autonomy, even if you can't change the external facts.

Your face might not literally move mountains as the saying goes, but it can utterly transform your experienced reality of those mountains.

It doesn't always take much.

Think about the word nowhere, implying confusion, disorientation, being lost.

Just by slightly reframing it, cleaving it into two words, you get, now here, present, grounded.

It's the radical opposite of feeling lost, just from a shift in perspective.

So as we kind of wrap up this deep dive, it becomes incredibly clear, doesn't it?

Your reality, my reality, your reality listening right now is this deeply personal construction.

It's shaped by everything from your unique genetic code and your earliest childhood experiences, right up to your conscious beliefs, your attitudes, and the choices you make every day.

It's not some universal objective truth we all share equally, but rather a deeply bespoke experience.

Exactly.

And if we connect this back to the

What if consciously recognizing our own perception box, understanding its invisible walls, the filters, the beliefs that shape it?

What if that awareness is actually the very first crucial step, the first step towards truly understanding other people, bridging those gaps in perception, and maybe even expanding our own capacity for profound personal change and growth?

How might this awareness, just holding this idea in mind, influence your daily interactions, maybe with your family, your colleagues, or even how you approach your own personal challenges going forward?

Something powerful to reflect on.

We really encourage you to continue your own exploration into this, well, frankly, astonishing topic.

What stood out to you from our conversation today about the very nature of reality?

Thank you so much for joining us for this deep dive.