Brain Beliefs

Our brain is an amazing device that receives an incredibly wide variety of sensory inputs—far more than we could ever interpret—and then distills all that data into a useful representation of the world around us. Evolution has taught the brain which kinds of information are relevant for our survival, and which to ignore or discard. Previous hominid species who went extinct must have possessed brains that were not quite as accomplished at this abridging task; allowing us humans to dominate.

I've written before of the amazing ability of the brain to receive differing and even conflicting messages from our fragmentary visual system, and still manage to create a stable, reasonably accurate visual version of the world around us. Although the process may not be all that accurate, it is utilitarian, it does the job well, and it keeps us alive and functional; which is the primary thrust of evolution.

Here's another example of how our brain processes the data delivered to it—in the interest of keeping us alive and thriving. We hear a lot about living in the moment—of responding to what is happening right now, rather than focus on what happened in the past, or might occur in the future. “Be here now” is an admonition that makes sense; attempting to keep us attentive to the present, to respond intelligently to the moment, rather than drifting off to the past or future.

But it turns out that our brain cannot actually attend to the moment. So the wisdom of evolution has taught our brain instead to create a three-second average of the overabundance of information it has just received. What the brain responds to—what it believes is reality—is an averaging or smoothing of all the data that's come in, over the last three seconds. 

This is brilliant! If it was not the case, we'd be wildly oscillating between instantaneous peaks—causing us to overreact to them—followed by instantaneous valleys—causing us to underreact to them. In the process we’d miss something crucial. We'd be endlessly flipping back and forth between tumult and indolence—experiencing wild and chaotic oscillations.

Instead, my brain smooths out all that vacillation—giving me a steadier view of my world. As a result, I’m less reactive to the extremes and more responsive to that three-second average. It's more conducive to my survival. My brain allows me to pay attention to that average.

So my experience of the moment is not the wildly-fluctuating moment, but a calmer version of reality. Evolution has brought about a situation that gives rise to my brain responding not exactly to momentary reality, but to a filtered and steadied version that keeps our species going.