The Nuance
Why Things Never Seem to Get Better
Researchers may have identified a brain quirk that promotes pessimism
Your brain is like a faultless movie projector. Sights, sounds, and a jumble of other sensory information pass into it via the spinning reel of your existence, and your brain reconstitutes that hodgepodge into an objective, lossless experience that you call consciousness.
Of course, that’s wrong.
Your brain is actually not a faultless projector. The reality it makes for you is biased and suggestible. Expectation, experience, emotion, and many other variables shape the world that your brain creates.
In his 2019 book Rethinking Consciousness, the Princeton psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Graziano explains that the brain’s interpretation of reality is built upon internal models that are patchy, subjective, and skewed— “like impressionistic or cubist paintings of reality,” he writes.
“Our intuitive understanding of the world around us and our understanding of ourselves, always distorted and simplified, are dependent on those internal models,” he adds.
A lot of recent scientific inquiry has explored how the brain constructs these internal models, and how their flaws may get us into trouble.
