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The Story Your Brain Decides to Tell
Two people walk into the same room.
One has been told that she is there to make new friends. The other has been told that she is there to determine whether the people in the room can be trusted.
Same room. Same people. Same conversations.
But perhaps not the same experience.
That is the fascinating implication of emerging neuroscience exploring how the brain constructs the story of our lives. We tend to imagine that our senses work something like cameras. Light enters the eyes. Sound enters the ears. Information travels to the brain. Reality comes in, and we experience it.
Except that isn’t really what happens.
The brain is constantly deciding what matters.
Our goals, expectations, memories and beliefs create a frame through which incoming information is interpreted. This month’s Scientific American article by Ingrid Wickelgren describes research suggesting that when people approach the same experience with different goals, their brains organize that experience differently.
Their neural activity begins to reflect the narrative they are constructing.
In other words, we don’t simply experience reality.
We edit it.
This is even more complex because we all show up with epigenetic fingerprints of past experiences.
Think about walking through an airport.
If you are hungry, you suddenly notice restaurants.
If you are late, you notice clocks.
If you are angry, you notice people’s energy and anger.
If have a history of trauma, you notice similarities of past experience.
If you have lost your child for thirty terrifying seconds, you notice every small person wearing a similar shirt.
The airport hasn’t changed.
Your brain’s response and perception has.
Your orientation and current frame/goal determines which pieces of an impossibly complicated environment rise into conscious awareness.
Neuroscientists have been circling this concept for decades. Marvin Minsky described mental “frames” as structures we bring to new situations. Rather than building our understanding of the world from scratch every second, the brain pulls up a model based upon previous experience and asks, essentially: What kind of situation is this? What should I expect? What matters here?….. And a section on maternal story and the default mode network.
Dr. M