Why Everyone Around You Might Be Hallucinating Too

[00:00:00]Where are you right now? Take a look around and take stock of your surroundings.

[00:00:06]What do you see? The inside of your car on the commute to work, an office cubicle, your bathroom floor, your bedroom ceiling.

[00:00:16]Now, [music] notice how you described it to yourself. You may have been literal.

[00:00:21]a wooden wall, the smell of something cooking on a stove, [music] a neighbor's dog barking, a picture frame, a desk, a tangle of cables, or maybe you reached for broader strokes. The interior of your room, a slice of blue sky, or the traffic that you're stuck in. However you described it, you just did something most people never think twice about. You observed the world outside of yourself. You took in that data and you trusted your mind to build an accurate picture of where you are. But what if you got it wrong?

[00:00:58]What if you aren't seeing the world as it is at all? What if I told you that there's a force that keeps you from experiencing the totality of what is around you? It keeps you blinkered, narrows your attention to only what it wants you to see. It edits your perception in real time. colors the world so you fit neatly in with the crowd. It uses halftruths, recreations, and outright fabrications. It steers you through life while insisting every step of the way that what you are seeing is real. You can't escape it. You can't outthink it because it isn't working against you from somewhere else. It's a part of you. It is you.

[00:01:47]This is one of the most terrifying theories in neuroscience you'll ever come across.

[00:01:58]Your brain is incredibly powerful yet so vulnerable at the same time. Packed into your skull is the most powerful tool for mapping the world around you, but one that is also uniquely exposed to being misled.

[00:02:14]Think about what your brain has to do every second that you're awake. It doesn't have the time or the energy to carefully analyze every photon hitting your eyes or every sound wave reaching your ear. So, it cheats. It takes shortcuts. It fills in gaps with assumptions and decides in advance what's probably true based on what's worked before. That's not a flaw bolted onto an otherwise perfect machine. That is the machine. The same shortcut that lets you recognize a friend's face in a crowded room in a fraction of a second.

[00:02:51]The same assumptions that let you catch a ball without solving a single equation are the exact mechanisms that can be hijacked, manipulated, or turned against you.

[00:03:02]Things like logical fallacies that we lean on to dodge complicated thoughts or ideas that clash with what we already believe. And it doesn't stop at the individual level. There's social pressure, too. The pull to tow the line.

[00:03:18]We're social animals, and our own brains reward us for falling in step with the group. Psychologists call this group think. It's easy to just go along with what everyone else believes and seeing what they're seeing because that's what our brains want to do. There are parts of our brain that drive this social cohesion. These devices are specialized neurons called mirror neurons. If you've ever wondered why yawning is contagious, well, you have your culprit. As your mirror neurons are compelling you to yawn when you see someone else yawning.

[00:03:54]The reason for contagious yawning is to pass a message through a social group.

[00:03:58]That message is, well, things are quiet right now, but we should stay alert. And when we yawn, we are keeping our minds sharp when otherwise we might be inclined to doze off. It's like mircats.

[00:04:11]If everyone is alert, the whole group will be much more likely to detect any incoming threats. Our mirror neurons are also responsible for empathy. When someone stubs their toe, we cringe along with them, even if we aren't stubbing our own toes. Our brains are stimulating empathy by simulating pain. And that shared experience brings us closer to the people around us. On top of all that, mirror neurons are responsible for our ability to learn an action just by observing someone else performing the same action. In our infancy, we learn a lot about how to relate with the world around us by watching our parents or other authority figures. It's in this way that behavior is quietly passed down from one generation to the next.

[00:05:00]But these mirror neurons can also take us down strange and dark paths. [music] But before we get into that, here's something worth sitting with. If perception itself [music] is this unreliable, human memory is worse. It doesn't just fade, it gets rewritten a little every time you retell it. And that's something I deal with on two levels. the big metaphorical who am I really version and the much more annoying day-to-day version. When making these videos, I talk with a lot of the team and also with experts, research calls, brainstorming sessions, interviews, and for the longest time, I'd either completely forget everything I heard and have to rewatch the entire meeting back or walk away with a notebook full of halffinish scribbles and a memory that, ironically, wasn't filling in the gaps very well. That's why I started using the Plaude Note Pro, a physical AI assistant that sits in on your conversations, so you can stay present without relying on your memory afterwards. One press starts studio quality recording, even from several meters away. [music] A quick second press marks important moments, so the AI knows exactly what mattered. But the part that's actually changed my workflow is ask plaud. After a session, I can type something in like, [snorts] "What did we agree on for this deadline?" And it pulls the answer straight from the transcript instead of having to scrub through an hour of audio. [music] It's also built with privacy in mind.

[00:06:35]So, it's GDPR, HIPPA, and SOC2 compliant. And your records are never used to train their AI models. Just keep in mind that if you're recording other people, you really, really should get their consent first. To stop relying on your memory and start remembering everything from your important conversations, click the first link in the description and use the code to get 10% off your order. Now, back to our story.

[00:07:02]In 1518, a craze swept the people of Strawburg, a region that today is part of France. A woman named Fra Trophia and her daughter, Frowine Amagots, began to dance in the streets of Strawburg. There was no celebration planned for the day and there was no music playing. But soon they would be joined by others, some of whom were dancing with such a single-minded obsession that only [music] death had the power to stop them. By mid August, the mysterious affliction had affected up to 400 people. The dancers were moving spasmotically, their bodies drenched with sweat. Many collapsed mid dance and others wore through their shoes and stained the flag stones of their town with bloody footprints.

[00:07:52]There are disagreements with the death toll, but historians estimate that on average 15 people a day were dying due to hunger or acute heart attacks at the peak of the incident. And then by September, it was over. The Strawber dancing epidemic came and went and left clergy, physicians, epidemiologists, and historians scratching their heads. The incident is one of the earlier examples of what is referred to as mass psychoggenic illness, an anxiety condition that spreads through tight-knit communities. By 1518, Strawburg had experienced a succession of famines, high grain prices, an outbreak of syphilis, and a recurrence of leprosy and the plague. The people were, simply put, at their wits end, and tensions were high. With a population constantly in survival mode, mental health declined and created a populace primed for a collective crash.

[00:08:54]Stress and cognitive load have been linked to higher rates of suggestability. If you've ever had to cram for exams or stay up until the wee hours of the morning finishing a paper that's due the same day, then you probably know the feeling. How stress starts taking over every part of you until it becomes harder and harder to think properly. And then bam, [music] you snap at everything and everyone. You stop thinking rationally through problems and you start taking shortcuts.

[00:09:25]Maybe you've noticed that while you're in a stress hole just trying to get that last bit of the project done that the people around you begin to take on that pressure as well. Or maybe you've been the other person watching a loved one spiral further and further and feeling yourself get stressed just by being near them. The mood is contagious. Soon enough, everyone is having a terrible, terrible time.

[00:09:54]The people of Strawborg were exposed to extreme stress by their environment.

[00:09:59]They were neurologically susceptible to suggestion. Because of these two factors, an entire population shared the same collective hallucination that there was a very real disease that was ravaging their town, forcing towns [music] folk to dance without end. To be clear, there was no dancing plague.

[00:10:20][music] But for the people living in Strawborg, it was very real. Their perceptions and even their health was influenced by this social fantasm. They experienced something as though it was very real. They suffered and died of a fake disease that in the moment felt as real as the ground they were standing on.

[00:10:43]And Strawber wasn't an isolated incident of mass hysteria. Other such incidents have occurred throughout history up to and including the evil clown panic of 2016. Maybe you remember that too. Rumors on the internet about people dressed as clowns attacking other people on the streets.

[00:11:04]Perhaps there were some isolated incidents here and there, but the coloprophobia, the fear of clowns that resulted was everywhere for a time. I even had friends warning me without any sense of irony to watch out for dangerous clowns.

[00:11:23]Weird times. There weren't any roving bands of clowns menacing people in the dead of night, but a shared social belief had managed to prevail on otherwise rational people that there were clown masked asalants lurking in every corner.

[00:11:42]On that note, technology and the internet in particular have done a lot of heavy lifting in demystifying a lot of urban legends. But at the same time, misinformation and disinformation have both been given a powerful avenue to spread through the populace and further warp perceptions away from reality. The scary part of all of this is that these perception warping empathic contagions aren't just limited to stressed out populations. Our language and culture have a huge effect on our understanding of the world around us. Prescratic sophist and philosopher Gorgius of Leontiny argued that the physical world could not be experienced except through language and that the truth of existence as we know it is filtered through our sense of aesthetics. Gorgias claimed that only through language could we figure out the physical [music] world.

[00:12:39]The truth of reality then is based on cultural preference or a functional consequence of our upbringing. Language forms the bedrock of our thoughts. Our experience of the world is influenced by the words that we have access to. With gendered languages like German, a bridge can be beautiful or elegant because the German word for bridge brooka is gendered feminine. But with Spanish, the word for bridge is poetente, gendered male. So bridges are often described with masculine coded words like strong, sturdy, or imposing. And it's the same with grammar. When someone you know walks into an antique store and accidentally breaks a plate, an English-speaking person would say, "Oh, well, so and so broke a plate." Where in Japanese you would say, "The plate broke." Notice how one linguistic structure creates guilt even though it was an accident, and the other simply recounts events without accusation.

[00:13:40]Language determines your thought patterns by creating or removing avenues for you to interpret your experiences.

[00:13:48]Your thoughts and feelings themselves are limited by the words that you have available to you.

[00:13:59]We've talked about how culture, language, and our social environment can shape our hallucination of reality. With strong critical thinking skills or weaker mirror neurons, we can decode and navigate situations that would otherwise have us throwing our lot in with the mob, dancing in the streets of Strawborg, or checking under your bed for killer clowns.

[00:14:24]But there's something that no amount of rationality, no amount of reality checking can solve. Our physical brains themselves are so much more capable at leading us astray. Anil Seth, a British neuroscientist and professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex has researched in depth [music] the connection between our perception and our lived experience. Through the course of his research, he has studied and mapped out the processes and mechanisms that drive our brains and shape our perceptions. Seth's claim that the brain isn't experiencing reality, but rather interpreting it holds up to scrutiny.

[00:15:08]Our eyes aren't sending [music] images to our brain. They're absorbing light using photo receptors, which then send electrical signals to our brain, which then decodes this information. and only then do we see. It's the same with all of our senses. We experience the world around us only in as much as our sensory organs are translating inputs into electricity that our brain then has to interpret.

[00:15:34]Our brains are complex biological machines. A delicate web of sensory devices allows our brains to build a complete picture of the world around us.

[00:15:45]Each of our senses, sight, [music] taste, hearing, and touch, allow us to navigate our surroundings with confidence. But these sensory organs, the eyes, the ears, the nose, tongue, and mechano receptors are not our brain.

[00:16:03]They're just relay nodes that take outside inputs and translate those inputs into signals that are then fed into the brain. Our brains do all the heavy lifting from there, translating those signals into conscious experience.

[00:16:17]So, I have a question for you. Have you ever been so absorbed in something that you lost track of your surroundings?

[00:16:25]Odds are you probably have. It's a pretty common human experience. Maybe you were walking down the street on your phone and at the last minute you managed to swerve out of the way of a street lamp on the sidewalk.

[00:16:37]or let's be honest, you might have smacked straight into it. It's totally okay. I do it more than I would like to admit. And afterwards, you are either chewing yourself out for not being attentive enough, or if you're like me, you are nursing an aching bump on your head. But you in the moment were so absorbed in [music] what you were doing that you couldn't see the pole. You only have enough attention to focus on so many things at once. But just where is that limit?

[00:17:08]There's a lot of data coming at us all the time. According to a study by Xiu Jang and Marcus Meister, our brains take in [music] a staggering 1 billion bits of information per second. This is everything that we encounter with all of our senses all at once. the sensation of you sitting or breathing, seeing and hearing. Of that 1 billion bits per second, we only consciously feel reality [music] at 10 bits per second. So of the billion bits that we take in, we experience only 10, leaving something like um [music] 9999,999,999 bits that we are just unaware of every [music] second of every day.

[00:17:57]So, where does it all go? If we really felt all of that input, we would be a mess. It would be constant over stimulation all of the time. We wouldn't get anything done. But it's not like this data just disappears. A theory about where the staggering mass of data goes is that it's shuffled into the subconscious to be figured out later on.

[00:18:19]We have a really cool video about the subconscious and dreaming. If you'd like to explore that topic more, you can watch it right after this one. But the question that I'm left with is what does the brain choose out of this massive data set for us to actually experience?

[00:18:35]If we only feel 0.00001% of what our brains collect, what makes one piece of information more important than another? And more importantly, how much of the world do we actually see if so much of it is locked away in our subconscious?

[00:18:58]Building on that, I want to talk about your eyes. They look really nice, by the way. But I'm even more interested in how they look. When you look at something, you feel as though your eyes are still.

[00:19:11]They're fixed on whatever you are looking at, but your eyes are actually moving the whole time. While you're softly focusing on the world around you, your eyes are twitching back and forth rapidly in movements called sacods.

[00:19:25]These micro movements of the eyes are hard to catch, but they move our eyes over key aspects of what we're looking at. Your eyes make these tiny movements three to five times a second, and it's thanks to these that we're able to see in as much detail as we are. But there is always a catch.

[00:19:43]Since our focus is spread out over three to five points every second, the information that is arriving in the occipital lobe of our brain is actually full of holes. But that's not what we see. Odds are as you're watching this video, [music] my face doesn't look like Swiss cheese.

[00:20:02]But if it ever does, please [music] tell me. No, there's a good chance that what you're seeing is my entire face. a couch, some shelves, and what you aren't [music] seeing is those gaps in your vision. But why don't you notice them?

[00:20:18]Well, I had the same question. And as I was researching conscious experience, I was hit by a haymaker of a concept that really drove hallucination theory home for me. According to Seth and many other neuroscientists, [music] our subconscious fills in these holes in our perception with what it thinks should go in these spaces. It doesn't take the time to fill in the full picture before feeding it back to us. It's not working harder to pull in extra information to fill in those gaps. [music] It is guessing what lives in those empty spaces based on what it expects to see.

[00:20:55]In case that needs repeating, our minds are seeing a fragment of a picture and then painting the rest in in [music] real time. Then we experience that image and call it objective experience. Well, that's mindblowing. Your brain is hallucinating reality to fill in the gaps. And there is further information that suggests that what it is imagining may not even resemble the outside world.

[00:21:21]In 1996, [music] a study on perception by Kovac at AL concluded that while we do take in all of the details of an image that we're seeing, our brains are erasing information that our brains judge to be too [music] improbable, even if that information is staring us right in the face. So the reality that we see is less empirical and more run on vibes than anything else. Being either shown to us because it makes sense to our subconscious or discarded if it doesn't.

[00:21:54]Our brains have the capacity to not only fill in the blanks, but [music] to omit or alter inputs that don't conform with its own internal logic.

[00:22:10]Everything we are is built on our perception. Without this, we would be barely functional automata with no senses. Our worlds would be confined to the space within our heads with no language to interpret what little life goes on in our closed off minds. But our senses have helped us model the world around us and pierce the veil of ignorance. We've done much based on our understanding of reality. We've puzzled out rudimentary physics, time, mechanics, engineering. We've uplifted ourselves from simple survival to empire building on a scale unmatched by any other life on our planet. And we've done so on the back of the rules of reality that our senses are relaying to us. In spite of these soaring accomplishments, we are no more aware of reality than we ever have been. Everything that we take for granted is gated by the limits of our cognition and then shackled further by the filters of our language and our culture. Our confidence in the world around us is built on such a small amount of information that our grasp on reality looks less like a mighty fortress and more like a house of cards built on a shaky foundation. We don't see the world as it is, but how it looks after being filtered through our language, our culture, and our subconscious.

[00:23:36]To some philosophical traditions focused on the nature of truth and our relationship to it, this seems like a death sentence. Our own biology hamstrings us from the very beginning, dooming us to a life where we can't escape Plato's [music] cave. It challenges our beloved ideas of truth, perception, identity, [music] free will, and interpersonal understanding. How well can we rely on our own knowledge when we understand that reality isn't just being [music] reinterpreted in our own minds, but that our minds are showing us the world around us based on a prediction of what it expects to see.

[00:24:14]not what it's seeing, [music] not even a close guess, but a prediction based on our brain's assumption of what makes sense.

[00:24:24]We assume that our perception is onetoone with reality. But the more we learn about the brain, the less likely it seems that our assumptions about reality are correct. We can hear sounds, feel textures, smell aromomas, and experience a myriad of sensations. But these experiences don't reflect the real world. They reflect an illusion created by our subconscious to improve our survival. Our favorite food smells and tastes delicious to us because our minds connect that food to sustenance needed to keep us alive. Garbage, waste, rotting food and sewage are translated in our minds [music] to smell revolting because avoiding contact with these improves our odds of avoiding illness.

[00:25:10]Our perceptive models didn't evolve to display reality as it really is. It evolved just enough to give us exactly the right information to ensure our continued survival. In the reality that lives outside of our perception, these things [music] don't inherently smell good or bad. They don't even have a smell, per se. It can be a sobering viewpoint to embrace [music] that our conception of reality is built on such a flimsy foundation. We can't trust our senses to give us the full picture and our perceptions are influenced to a greater degree than we are often aware by the language that we speak and the culture that we grow up surrounded by. If our brains are continuously generating reality instead of merely receiving it, then our relationship with the world is far more uncertain than common sense suggests.

[00:26:08]And this calls into doubt our notions of identity [music] and the self. Most people experience themselves as individuals existing independently of their sense of understanding. [music] The belief is that you are the one wielding and shaping your understanding, not the other way around. You, the person, we believe, are doing the observing. Yet, neuroscience increasingly suggests that the self is itself a construction, a self-portrait resulting from our senses turning inwards. But now, we know how shaky that idea is. Your memories aren't static, forever etched exactly as they are into the bedrock of your gray matter. time, distance, and even our current emotional state can alter our memories. If your image of you is based on your memories and your senses, then it gets harder and harder to justify that there is a concrete you to begin with. So, the self becomes another controlled hallucination. It's a concept that your brain created out of your memories. It's a very useful structure enabling coherent action and interaction with social groups, but that doesn't make it real. A sense of self is an evolutionary boon, and perhaps that's all it is. It may not correspond to any kind of fixed essential essence of you. Any sense of you is a result of narrative constructed from a continuity of memories. You are less so you, the entity, and more so you, the story. And as with any story, there is always room for reinterpretation and retelling. But as these stories are retold, they begin to shift and morph like a photocopy of a photocopy. The story of you changes with each retelling.

[00:28:00]This can be both incredibly liberating and deeply [music] unsettling. We don't enjoy having our sense of self called into question. We fear death because it is at its core the end of the experience of us. But at the same time, if identity is as wobbly as neuroscience would suggest, then we are given an incredible opportunity to transform and reimagine ourselves. We aren't trapped by some immutable inner self. We are capable of growth, change, and even wholesale re-imagination of our core identity.

[00:28:39]And I think there is another silver lining that comes with embracing such uncertainty. For one, I don't think that accepting the limitations of our senses should lead to radical skepticism. Our brains evolved to make sense of an overwhelming amount of data and to prioritize our survival and our ability to navigate our surroundings with success. Even if the models generated by the brain may not reflect reality, at the very least these models seem to be constrained by reality.

[00:29:12]It becomes less a perfect simulation and more like a map. We lose confidence in the fine details, but the layout is still useful as a guide.

[00:29:22]More important to me and I hope you can take it this way as well is how it teaches us humility. All of us are working with different pieces of the same puzzle. If our experience is a model instead of true observation, then any kind of certainty becomes impossible to justify. We often assume that what we are seeing, hearing and believing is the [music] way things really are. And yet, different cultures and individuals all experience the world differently. What comes off as self-evident to you may be invisible to someone else. And this insight [music] can foster empathy. When we accept that others genuinely experience the world differently than we do, disagreement becomes less a matter of ignorance or malice and more a natural result of multiple individuals having different mental models. The realization that perception is interpreted on the fly rather than purely objective should encourage both patience in our interaction with others and openness about our own experiences.

[00:30:31]Recognizing the constructed nature of perception reminds us all that our understanding will never be perfect.

[00:30:38]We'll never see the full picture. The same grace that you would and should extend to yourself for operating with less than perfect information should absolutely be extended to others. Anyone who claims that they have the world figured out is fooling themselves.

[00:30:57]If talking about how our brains can cause us to hallucinate reality got your imagination going, then I recommend this video where we discuss how quantum mechanics can affect our conscious minds.