Is your brain deceiving you? | Ashley Smith | TEDxEdina

alien, did you hear that NASA's new telescope just captured evidence of extraterrestrial life? Fake news is everywhere and do you know which is the biggest source of fake news? It's not television, it's not social media and no, it's not the person on the other side of the political spectrum. For you, the biggest source of fake news is inside

your

head. Our

brain

s have the enormous job of processing tons of information that comes to us every second of every day so that it can ultimately keep us alive. We trust them to make sense of it quickly. everything to detect potential dangers and discomforts and guide us on what to do, can we trust them?

Contrary to what many people believe, our

brain

s not only reflect and respond to some objective reality, but actually construct it, let me illustrate, connect these dots to form a picture in

your

mind you got it right, raise your hand how many of you? You saw a house well, how about a star?, well, and some lightning out there, ah, well, who is right? I don't know, but the point is that there are many ways to connect the dots and those dots represent facts as close to objective reality as we can get. Facts are the things you can know for sure right now through your direct experience.

Let me tell you that again the facts are the things you can know for sure right now through your direct experience. anything else is a fiction our minds are problem-solving thought-generating machines designed to connect the dots to create a complete picture that helps us understand our experiences and drives our reactions they do this by making predictions assumptions judgments and interpretations our minds set expectations draw conclusions Tell us what it all means These fictions are mental fabrications, they don't exist in the real world, but they help us navigate it and, like MSNBC and Fox News, they can take the same set of facts and put a very different spin on our minds.

Can someone important like your boss or your partner do the same? Says we need to talk. I'm in trouble. What did I do wrong or great? They must have good news to share. Say hello to me and I literally walk past you without saying hello. she's rude or she probably just didn't see me you made a mistake she's not good at this maybe I should give up or well, well I learned a valuable lesson for next time, see how the same facts can create anxiety? anger, defeat or emotion, compassion and resilience, depending on the turn our minds take.

Master storytellers. Adept at taking fragments of sensory information and weaving them into a cohesive narrative that shapes our world. We get trapped in their fictions, conflating our thoughts with reality and treating them as In fact, when in reality they are not, what then happens when our brains connect the dots in a useless way and this happens much more often than it could think? Here's why, because our brains have to process so much information, they connect so many dots so quickly. We have developed some shortcuts to speed things up and while they are efficient, these shortcuts lead to some biases or flaws in the way we What we think: Imagine the cave people sitting around the watering hole and suddenly they hear a rustling in the nearby bush, those who assumed it was a predator could run to safety if they were wrong, big deal, they would live to be wrong another day, but if they assumed it was the wind and was actually a saber-toothed tiger, the results could be catastrophic, so human brains developed a negativity bias that makes them tune in more easily and cling to bad things and You know this bias if nine people tell you that you did a great job on that project and one says "I thought you blew it", which one weighs more, yes, or how about this one when you start to anticipate. the future say how your date or your job interview is going to go what if with positive results what if I achieve this is the beginning of something incredible no, uh, of course, no our minds focus on the things that could turn out wrong because that's what they're designed to do, negativity bias is just the tip of the iceberg of deception.

Our brains are responsible for filtering out any fact that they consider unnecessary or unimportant, for example, without looking at how many doors there are in this building. an available fact, but unless you've been sitting here planning your Escape, your brain probably deemed it irrelevant and filtered it out. Imagine what else he could be hiding from you. Sometimes facts pass through filters and are still ignored due to confirmation. Bias: This is the tendency of our minds to selectively favor evidence that supports what we already believe to be true while overlooking or dismissing anything that indicates otherwise. Confirmation bias really helps keep our beliefs in place and is one of the main reasons you can't convince. that person on the other side and why they can't convince you there are many more shortcuts in prejudice suffice to say that our brains trick us in order to be efficient and effective, they really want to keep us safe, but not necessarily happy and that means that when left to their own devices, our minds can become fear mongers, shouting opinions and conjectures like the talking heads on television, influencing our decisions and distorting our perceptions, and when we fall victim to mentally constructed fake news, we pay the price with suboptimal life experience and much more suffering than necessary.

I know I certainly did. I was born with a rare degenerative retinal disease that leaves me legally and increasingly blind until just a few years ago there was no explanation why I can't. I saw the country's leading experts and they told me that, although they didn't know what it was, they were sure it was stable. They were wrong. When I turned 20, my vision began to decrease. The changes are gradual and unpredictable. From time to time, I have a few days of shaky vision and eye strain and then I see a little less than before. I never know when these changes will happen or how big they will be and I don't know if they will stop.

I hit a real low point when my vision loss progressed so much that I could no longer drive. I felt like my world was collapsing as I lost opportunities and independence. I was consumed with fear and sadness because I knew there was no way I could do the same. things I wanted to do and I knew that others would not accept me when they realized the magnitude of my defect and deep down I knew that there was no way I could be happy with blindness or so my mind told me because too often I took that darkness narrative as facts and it kept me stuck I retreated and gloated and lamented the loss of my future resigning myself to this new reality but eventually I got so tired of being miserable staring down the barrel of a bleak future that I didn't want to know something had to happen. changing my vision is a fact I can't change it but I desperately wanted to be happy I didn't know what else to do so being the professional nerd that I am I dove head first into the science of happiness I read everything I could get my hands on and came across an actual study which compared the happiness levels of blind people with those of sighted people.

Do you know what they found? There is absolutely no difference. Which was unexpected. The science directly contradicted what I knew to be correct. The data may not speak to you the way it did to me, but I took it as proof positive that my mind might be a little wrong, reinforced by this first hint of hope. I was determined to look for any more contradictory evidence I could find. found in the form of Isaac Lipsky, he's a Ted speaker and author, an Ivy League-educated lawyer turned businessman who runs a multimillion-dollar company with a beautiful wife and family and is blind, he was living proof of another possibility. , these new facts were encouraging. for a different reality, one where I could be legally blind and be happy, successful, and surrounded by people who care about me.

Flaw and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't convince myself to believe it. I needed something more convincing, more compelling. and I got it. I'll tell you how, but first a little detour. I was on the varsity gymnastics team when I was a freshman in high school and I can still do a standing backflip. Do you think you're laughing already? Do you believe Me Now? If you're anything like the kids I work with in my psychology practice, you're looking at me with blatant skepticism, thankfully I can't see your faces, there are some advantages, but you're probably thinking, yeah, right, ma'am, that's just who you are. too old to do backflips, that's cool, I get it.

I'm older than most Geminis, but what if I told you I've been practicing consistently for 25 years? It's very easy for me. Are you convinced? I'm surprised I didn't expect it one hundred percent. What would it take to convince you definitively? I would have to prove it. Make a turn here. It's okay, I'm just kidding. Oh, and I lost the microphone. Okay, that's going to be awkward, so okay, for the record. Can't. I could never do a backflip. She was a terrible gymnast. I was only on the varsity team because all the older girls were expelled for breaking school rules.

I share this story to illustrate the most powerful strategy for revising those fictions in which we construct beliefs through behavior. Instead of confusing fictions with facts and blindly following the directives of our mind, we have to challenge them, we have to test their assumptions, challenge our brain to test it and by doing so we create new experiences and discover new facts, that's what happened to me. me. I am well adjusted according to my doctors, this means that I am very good at pretending to see and pretending to be normal, that is a survival mechanism. I spent most of my life trying to hide my disability because, well, I was ashamed, my mind told me that no one would love me personally or professionally if they knew the truth, so unsure if I was going to cry or throw up or both, I said prove it to my brain and hit publish by sharing my story online for everyone I know to read and once the fear and vulnerability hangover subsided, I realized there was nothing wrong.

It had happened, in fact, people supported me and I actually felt a little better, so I kept going. I started to be honest. I can't see that asking for help. Can you read that for me? Would you take me? Would you mind saying hello when I arrive? Go inside so I don't wander around awkwardly trying to find you. I took even bigger steps by starting my own business and forging new relationships. I presented myself in ways I would never have considered before and do you know what happened? the horrible things my mind promised not one at every step every time I said try it I gathered new facts that shaped My New Reality surprisingly people still seem to want to spend time with me I have had more professional opportunities and successes than I could have I was hoping and discovered how to live life independently thanks to the magnifying glasses at Uber.

I have collected irrefutable and compelling evidence that I can be happy despite vision loss. I wonder what lies your mind is telling you and how much it might be costing our lives too often. Our Brains Deceive Us We accept their fictions as truths without realizing that fictions can be edited, revised, or deleted entirely. We no longer separate facts from fictions. We undertake a fact-finding mission and demand evidence. We stop falling for mentally constructed fake news and start living our new life. story thank you foreigner