Can you trust your brain?

Our brains have a way of playing tricks on us — like that ringing in our ears known as tinnitus. It’s a sound in your head, created to make up for hearing loss. And that’s not the only way minds create the world we live in.

“I study whether The Matrix is a movie or a documentary,” Pascal Wallisch, a professor of data science, neuroscience, and psychology at NYU, told Vox. Whether our senses are simply transmitting objective reality — or creating an artificial, subjective one.

“Everything that you perceive is filtered for your sensory organs and then goes for your brain,” Wallisch said. “ If we assume that you have a unique brain — which I do — then you are bringing a lot of yourself to what you experienced.”

What are other ways things aren’t what they seem, and why do our brains function like this in the first place? We answered those questions on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Wallisch, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

In the case of tinnitus, our brain creates a sound that’s not actually there. Does our brain do this for the other senses as well?

In a nutshell, yes. For instance, neuropathic itch, where you think there’s something itching you, but it’s in your mind. 

But I want to be very clear: It is very real in your mind, even though your mind generates it. I’m sure you have seen faces in clouds that were not there. This is actually very common. You’re seeing meaning everywhere. 

I’ve looked up at the clouds and seen things. That’s my brain constructing my visual reality?

Yes. My biggest flex is that I figured out why some people see the dress, the infamous black and blue/white and gold dress that surfaced in February of 2015. 

What did you see it as, white and gold or black and blue?

I saw black and blue, but my friends saw white and gold.

And are you more like a night owl or more like a morning person?

I have developed into a morning person.

But you historically are a night owl, yes?

Yes.

There you go. We had a study where we showed, yes, some people legitimately see as white and gold, some as black and blue. 

It has to do with your assumptions about lighting. If you assume the dress was backlit or in a shadow or illuminated by white light, bright light, sunlight, it would be white and gold. If you assumed it was artificial light or inside, then you would see it as black and blue.

And that perception depends on what you have seen more of: If [you’re] a night owl, you’ve seen more artificial light. 

Is there a hypothesis or a reasoning why our brains work this way, why they do this?

Your senses are not there for your viewing pleasure. They are there for survival. If you were sitting around until you had all of the information, until all the sensory information was unambiguous, some other animal would’ve already eaten your lunch or maybe eaten you. You’re the offspring of survivors who, the moment they could make a call, made a call and acted on it. To be faster, you basically have to jump to conclusions. The conclusion can be wrong, but it’s better than not acting. 

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re in the forest and there is a tiger. You start getting a bad sense of it. Maybe you smelled something faint. Maybe you saw a little toe of a tiger somewhere, and then you bolted. You left. Your ancestors who were like, “I need more information. I want to see the full tiger before I make any moves,” well, they were eaten by a tiger. Because by the time you see the tiger, it’s too late. 

What’s the cost of being wrong? Well, you get a little scared, but that’s okay. We can live with that, literally. 

What does all of this tell us about how reliable our senses are? Can we trust how we’re interacting with the world?

Overall, they’re very reliable. But you have to understand that they’re reliable because of many redundant systems. I think the real lesson is we need to be more modest and more humble about how sure we are about what we think is true. 

So are we living in the Matrix? 

In all likelihood? Yeah.

Wow. It’s like we can trust our brains because they keep us safe, but everything may not always be what it appears.

Correct. Here’s the reality. You and I and everybody else, we are sharing a low-dimensional — three-dimensional, maybe — embedding space, but there’s a much deeper reality out there that our brains’ senses can’t see. There’s no question about that. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it just means it’s deeper than you think. We don’t know what it is. It could be anything.

How do we keep living if there’s this world that’s right in front of us that we’re not experiencing because this is what our brains are doing?

That’s the whole point of why we have these senses is we have to pretend that this is it. We have to act as if, yes? 

But this gives you, or at least me, a lot of comfort. This might not be all there is. There might be a deeper reality out there. So this might not be all there is, and that might be amazing and exciting.