11 Reasons Why Your Brain Is A Total Dick

Hey. We hate to tell tales, but your brain has been lying to you all this time.

In your day to day life, your brain runs almost entirely on autopilot (as we've previously discussed). This means that most of the things that you see/hear/feel/taste/think/whatever is actually your brain's cobbled together version of reality based on your past experiences.

It can't constantly react to and process every stimulus as though it were brand new, that would make your head explode. 

Instead, your brain relies on the fact that we're creatures of habit and that the same things will probably happen to it most days. This means that if it misses something, it'll just make it up based on what it already knows.

The brain relies heavily on its pattern spotting abilities to do this. We are massively predisposed to pick out patterns in seemingly random things in order to rationalise them to ourselves. This is the reason why people have been spotting faces (and now women) on Mars for years, or perhaps picking out human-like features in a shadowy window and saying its a ghost.

Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. Once you get an idea in your head, you brain will do everything it can to make the world match it. 

Whether it's noticing that your partner is "behaving oddly",  or a belief that someone is predicting your future based on the movements of the planets, your brain will collect all of the supporting evidence and disregard anything that contradicts this view.

No two people will experience the world in the same way, and neither of them will experience it how it really is. 

Reality is what you, or more accurately, you brain, makes of it.