Instant Genius - How your brain builds your picture of reality

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

How do our brains help us build up a picture of the world around us? It’s a question that has both beguiled and fascinated scientists for centuries. The latest thinking suggests that the brain acts like a scientist that builds up a database of previous observations and experiences and uses this to make sense of the world around us. In this episode, we speak to Daniel Yon, an experimental psychologist based at Birkbeck, University of London to talk about his latest book A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality. He tells us about the intimate link between our brains and senses, how our brains create our sense of self and make judgements about others, and how our brains come up with new theories and ideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size matter class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. How do our brains help us build up a picture of the world around us? It's a question that is both beguiled and fascinated scientists for centuries. The latest thinking suggests that the brain acts like a scientist that builds up a database of previous observations and experiences and uses this to make sense of the world around us. In this episode, we speak to Daniel Yon, an experimental psychologist based at Birkbeck, University of London, to talk about his latest book, A Trick of the Mind, How the Brain Invents Your Reality.

He tells us about the intimate link between our brains and senses, how our brains create our sense of self and make judgments of about others and how our brains come up with new theories and ideas. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. So today we're talking about your book, A Trick of the Mind, how the brain invents your reality. So the basic premise is that the brain operates like a scientist. So before we get into some of the finer details, can you give me a brief overview of what you actually mean by that? Yeah. So in my in my everyday life, that I'm a scientist. I am a psychologist and a neuroscientist, and with my lab, I try to understand what happens inside your skull to make your mind happen. And in so doing, in the studies

that we've been doing in which many colleagues have been doing around the world, we've come up with this new idea to try and understand how the brain works. I think in the past, we might have thought of the brain as being sort of like a machine or a computer, sometimes running fast, sometimes running slow. And instead, now, as you say, we think that it's doing something different. We think the better way to describe its occupation is as if it's a scientist. So what I mean by that when I say that the brain is a scientist is that it's in the business of building its own theories and paradigms

to make sense of the world around it, just like scientists make their own theories to make sense of the world too. At the same time, though, just like scientists, once you have these theories, those become the filter and the lens through which everything else is seen. So you split the book into sort of three broad areas or worlds, really, so matter, mind and ideas. So let's start with the material world then. So I guess really we're talking about senses and perception. So let's start with perhaps the most obvious thing that people would think of.

And that's vision. So what actually happens in our brains when we look at something? Well, exactly. I mean, I think maybe the sort of intuitive way you'd think about it, right, would be there's the outside world. You've got your eyes, lights bouncing off of objects, and it's going inside the retina of the back of your eye, and then a bit like a camera, your brain is making its own picture based on the sort of pixels that your eyes pick up. And that's, you know, intuitive, but it's only half the story, because if you were to think about the kinds of information your eyes can pick up, the sorts of patterns that reflect off of the world into you, they're deeply, deeply ambiguous.

I mean, I don't know if you or your listeners might be familiar with things like a classic Father Ted joke about cows being small or being far away. But that really gets an essence of a kind of key problem for your kind of visual system, which is that the actual information it gets is not really detailed enough to work out, you know, is an object very, very small and very close, or is it very, very large and very far away. The input is, it's what engineers might call an ill-posed problem. It's really, really difficult from the day. technically impossible to get from the image on the eye to what the world is really like.

So what's happening in your brain is you're taking the signals in, but you're not seeing them kind of innocently. What's really happening at the same time is your brain is projecting its own expectations, its own assumptions and theories about what the world is like. And it's through that process of mixing together reality with expectation that you end up with the perceptions that you have. Yeah, so let's stick with that. So say on the table in front of me, I have an egg and an apple.

So how do I know the egg's an egg and the apple's an apple? I mean, that's a good question. I suppose it would mean a little bit about what do you mean by know it's an egg and that when you say, I'm seeing an egg. You're not just seeing that oval in front of you, right? You're seeing all of the things that make eggs egg-like and all the possibilities that eggs have. You know, when you look at an egg, for instance, that if you were to crack it, you know, the yolk would come out and things like that. And so in that sense, when you're looking at the world in front of you, it's not just the raw input, but your brain also bringing to bear all of this kind of rich crystallized knowledge, all these theories and hypotheses about how things are going to behave. And those things also colour how you see things too.

So sticking with the idea of the brain as a scientist, so when I see the egg, that's based on my previous sort of experiments with the real world with eggs. Your egg experiments, indeed. So I have this sort of database of experience that lets me know if I drop that on the floor, it will crack. Yeah, precisely. And I don't think you come into the world knowing that, right? It's not like newborns are imprinted with this understanding of eggs. It's through your interactions with the world that you understand how it works.

And you're constantly in this process of using each exchange you have with the world around you to build these models of how you think things are going to unfold. The thing is that process is, you know, it's at the heart of how thinking works, but it also means that you're going to be somewhat a prisoner to your past experiences. You know, if we imagine putting you in a situation where, you know, I give you like, I don't know, an Easter egg, which from the outside looks rather different to a chicken's egg, but is resembling one of your kind of previous things you've learned about. You're going to bring to bear all of your expectations for how eggs work to this chocolate thing wrapped in tin foil, but you're going to be wrong. So just because it's very sensible to build these theories, build these expectations, it doesn't mean they're always going to help you see the world more clearly. So what's going on when we make these predictions?

I mean, can we say that? So even something simple as saying, say I throw a ball at you, and you can, based on your past experience, and depending on how good your hand-eye coordination is, you try to reach out for it where you think it's going to go, and then catch it right? So can we expand that metaphor to other experiences? Well, I think when you see something like a moving ball, you can actually see inside the brain a kind of predictive forecasting of where things ought to be rather than where they really are.

It's as though at a given moment in time in your brain, you're already slightly in the future. Your kind of visual cortex has got patterns that aren't representing where things really are on your eye. They're representing where things ought to be based on this kind of unfolding belief. And I think this will work for lots of aspects of the physical environment because as well as being ambiguous, perception is just really quite slow. If you think about the fact that, you know, if you step out in front of a road and you want to avoid being hit by a car, you don't have time to very slowly and deliberately process the, you know, oncoming transit van that's going to flatten you.

You need to very quickly come up with a kind of interpretation and very quickly use that to guide your actions. And so that's part of the reason why these hypotheses and theories are useful. They let you take that shortcut very quickly. And I think you're doing it for every aspect of your environment, not just when someone throws a ball at you or if a van is possibly going to hit you. So sticking with this perception of a sort of immediate reality, it's often said that actually most of the things that you're seeing are being filled in by your brain. I mean, is that true?

I mean, that's not just metaphorical. I think that pretty much is at the core of how your perception works. And we can even see that in some kinds of experiments that you can do in the lab. So one really lovely experiment that I think speaks to this filling in idea was one that was done by Lars Muckley and Fraser Smith. In this experiment, what they did was they actually gave people photographs where one corner was completely removed. So it literally is a blank space.

There is nothing for your eye to see. But you can put someone inside of an MRI scanner and see in that empty corner of their visual brain, what is the brain seeing? And it doesn't have just empty space there. If you kind of analyze the patterns of activity that kind of bubble up while people are looking at these pictures, you see that their brain is filling in the details

of what they think should be there, given the context they find themselves in. So if you see, for instance, that one of these photos, for instance, is of this kind of quite flash convertible car going into a tunnel, but a big chunk of it removed, you can see the participant's brain in the scanner filling in details that carry the information about what the rest of the scene should contain. So this kind of, I don't, I might be way off track here, but this kind of filling in idea can lead us to misperceive things. So things like,

you know, paradolias or even full-blown hallucinations. So what can we say about that? Well, yeah, I think that you're right, the filling in, though it's a core, part of how we see clearly, it's also not going to be always reliable. If you think about what I said about, you know, the eggs and the Easter eggs, you can try and fill in your expectations, but if you've got the wrong expectation, it's not going to help you. You're going to be injecting information into your experience of the world that's going to take you further away from reality, rather than putting you nearer in touch with the fact of your surroundings. And that gives you a kind of new way of thinking, I think about what hallucination really is. I think that, you know, you often think that

hallucinations, almost kind of by definition is when something's gone deeply wrong with perception. But when this, you know, it's a sign of, you know, we would generally think that it's a sign of mental illness. That's the kind of, I think, the sort of standard way that most people, you know, in the general population would think about seeing things or hearing things that aren't really there. But if you take this idea seriously, it actually means something rather different, that actually hallucination is a kind of core ingredient to how perception works, that you're constantly having these projections from your brain into reality. And that gives us a new way of thinking about the really serious kinds of hallucinations we see,

for instance, in people who have psychotic illnesses, or even people who hallucinate and aren't mentally unwell at all. One example, for instance, where we see this idea unfold in some of the science is if you take people who have hallucinations in everyday life, you can see this filling in process in their brain behaving rather differently. So one case where you might see hallucinations would be in psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia, where they're the most common hallucination is that people hear voices, even though there's no kind of identifiable cause for the voice that they're hearing. And if you take people who have these experiences in their everyday life, often quite distressing experiences, depending on what the voice says to you, you can see that

these patients who are likely to hallucinate in the real world also show these particularly pronounced kinds of filling in during the neuroscience experiments and during the sort of psychological tests. It's true for both the people who are having hallucinations and not. I mean, everybody's filling in. But if you give people these experiments, for instance, work by people like Christoph Toifel developed some really nice paradigms where you could see how much people would fill in the details of very, very ambiguous images. And everybody benefits from knowing what's in the image and can use that to see it more clearly. But this is extremely pronounced in the people who have the hallucinations, which can make us think that the reason you're hallucinating is because

you're relying very heavily on your brain's theories of how the world works. You're having a much stronger reflection back of those expectations in the experiences that you have. But I think one thing that is kind of extremely intriguing about this is that you can see this connection between hallucination and expectation, even in people who are not unwell. So some really lovely work that was led in the lab of a colleague of mind, Phil, call it at Yale, actually compared experiences and the kind of brain and behavior of people who sometimes hallucinate in the context of psychiatric illness, so things like schizophrenia, but also people who have hallucinations that aren't diagnosed with any mental health condition. And his particular group is a group of

psychics. So these kind of clairaudient psychics are people who daily hear voices from beyond the grave messages to pass on to the loved ones that remain with us. These people have experiences that look a lot like the experiences that you might see in the clinic, but if a psychic would go to see a psychiatrist, they would say, aside from the voices you're hearing, there's nothing wrong with you. And what's kind of intriguing in some of Phil's experiments is if you compare what's happening in the brains of people who do have a psychotic illness, who do hallucinate, or every other combination, you can see there's particular brain networks that are involved in hallucinating and possibly separate underlying causes for being unwell. Why I find that particularly

kind of intriguing is it makes us think that it's not just that people who hallucinate have experiences that detach them from reality and that's why they're unwell. You can have experiences that are rather unusual that aren't shared by the population at large, but nonetheless live a otherwise healthy life. And that breaks the link, I think, between, for one of the better word, hallucination and madness. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building.

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unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So let's have a look at another sort of fundamental thing if we're talking about reality. And that's our sense of self. So this is really fascinating, isn't it? I mean, what do we know about that?

I mean, one area where I think this becomes really almost kind of sort of triply symmetrical is that everything that I said to you earlier about perceiving the outside world also applies to when we're thinking about perceiving our inside world. There's the same sort of problem that if you want to see the outside world, you have these kind of random corrupted signals coming to your eyes and you've got to work out what the world is like. Something rather analogous is happening when you are trying to sit and reflect on what you're like.

It's sort of like the brain listening to and perceiving itself. And there are lots of ways that you can study this process in a kind of non-metaphorical way. You can actually make this something that you can study in the lap. You can see, for instance, that people's confidence in different aspects of their mental ability or behavior is connected to the way that they can listen to the variability in the noise in their own head. So in some experiments, for instance, you can find that people's sense of confidence in what they can or can't see is connected to the fluctuations in the noise in their visual brain, such that if in any given moment my visual cortex is a bit noisier,

that makes me feel a bit more uncertain about how good I am at vision, how clearly I can see things. The problem with that, as you might guess, is it's really, really difficult for the brain to listen to the noise in its own head. It's got this same kind of ambiguity you have when you're looking at the outside world, and so just like you need the assumptions for the outside world, you need them for the inside world too. you need to have a kind of theory, a set of expectations, a set of hypotheses about yourself

that you use to make sense of these signals. That kind of means that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you're not seeing a kind of unadulterated picture of yourself. It's a bit like one of those bits of the fairgrounds where things are distorted or expanded. You see a version of yourself that's been refracted and reflected through the prisms of your own beliefs about what you're like. So how about the ways in which we perceive other people? A lot of times people say, you know, you can't put yourself into the mind of others. Well, not literally, but there's still a number of processes going on there that enable us, you know, to give us empathy and things like this. What can we say about that? Well, I think that, you know, you sort of corrected yourself there when you

said, oh, you know, we can sort of get inside the minds of other people. I really think that that's misleading. I don't think we can. I think that other people, you know, are these, you know, strictly speaking, their minds are these sort of sealed boxes, these kind of private islands that sort of float past us day and day out. And we think that we have access to what's going on inside, but that itself is a product of your kind of brain scientific processes, making its own assumptions and theories. All you really see is the outside, it's the external behaviour that people show. And from that, you sort of theorise what you think is going on inside their mental world. That works, I think, in a very similar way to the way that visual perception works, or all perception works. It's about taking the signals,

trying to interpret them through the expectations you have. But that also means you're going to have the same problem, that if you have expectations that are, say, tuned to a certain kind of person or a certain set of people that you've met in the past, when you end up using those models to make sense of other people, you're going to end up making mistakes. So in doing this, in sort of trying to put ourselves in the minds of others, what sort of common mistakes can we make? Yeah, good question. I mean, I think one common mistake I think might come from failing to properly read the emotions of other people, especially if they don't emotionally communicate in the way that we might expect. So some of the work that I've been involved

with, for example, has kind of questioned the idea that there's one universal body language. and instead perhaps it's more like we all have our own body dialect that I try to understand how emotions are expressed with a model that's really tuned to how I express my own feelings. Now what that kind of means, though, is if you get different people who move their bodies differently, say, when they feel a certain way, I'm not going to be able to properly understand their feelings because I'm going to be trying to interpret them through the filters that I've put up myself.

and this can happen, for instance, I think this gives you a really interesting perspective on, say, why parents and teenagers might clash in some of the work that I've been involved with. These were experiments that were led by a colleague of mine, Rosie Edie. What she found in her studies was that as you age through childhood, as you go from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, your body generally slows down.

And the consequence of that is that if you take different age groups like adolescents and adults, they'll be moving their bodies rather differently and they'll therefore be expressing their emotions rather differently. Because of that change in speed, it means if you think about how the different age groups perceive each other, you can have these mismatches. So if you are an adult and you see a relatively fast adolescent, that can make them seem kind of exuberantly happy or exuberantly angry, but really they just feel nothing in particular. They just move quite quickly.

By the same token, if you think about how you're perceiving your parents as a, as an adolescent, they'll seem slower than you, and as a consequence, they'll seem unexplainably morose and upset and depressed. And if you put those two things together, you can imagine the sense of miscommunication that even if no one feels any particular way, your child seems angry and your parents seem upset with you for no reason, and that's maybe enough to provide the spark that you need for your next argument. It's not just those interpersonal relationships with, say, like, parents and teenagers, though, that I think are interesting. I think you can also think about this in some context of neurodiversity

and how it can be difficult for, but in the example, for instance, I think is described in most detail in my book, is possible miscommunications between people with autism and people who are neurotypical. I think there's been this idea, this kind of received wisdom that when you think about what's going on in people with autism, it's a kind of failure to understand the minds of other people. What's implicit in that is the sense that

for the neurotypical majority, their perception of minds is fine. But actually, again, in some of the work that Rosie was doing, what she could do is she could compare not just how people with autism would perceive expressions in general, but how our ability to perceive the mental states of other people was closely connected to how our bodies moved. So what she could find, for instance, was that, yes, it's true that people with autism find it hard to decode the mental

states of neurotypicals. But it's also true that relatively speaking, neurotypicals find it harder to decode the expressions of autistic people. So it's not just that one is bad and one is good, but it kind of fundamentally sort of takes two to tango and that if you want to make sense of someone else, you need to do so through a model that's going to accommodate the way that they behave, the way that they express the inside of their own mind. So the sort of third plank that you talk about is the world of ideas. So this is really interesting because it's kind of, you've made me think, what is an idea and what does a neuroscientist think an idea it actually is? Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a good question. I hope that this doesn't end up implying that I, I don't know

what an idea is because I haven't got any of my aim. I think where I actually start from in the book is to think that I take the idea that was actually offered by, by Carl Popper. And Carl Popper thought that the world of ideas was just as real as the physical world that is made of atoms and molecules. That when you think about things like great works of art or great scientific theories or pieces of music or religions or political systems, all these all these kinds of conceptual things, they exist in their own right was Popper's view. And in a sense, it's not just that these things only exist in the minds of individual people, but there is a kind of whole catalogue of possible things you could think about that your brain is somehow getting access to you.

And I think that, yeah, the third part of the book is trying to think about, how is it that we can understand these ideas that started off being an individual minds, but now are much bigger than any one thinker. Yeah, and something that I thought was really interesting is you talk a bit about the notion of originality. And I mean, this comes up all the time with these lawsuits, or you, you know, you copied this particular chord progression or you copied this particular visual motif or something. So, you know, what can a neuroscientist tell us about originality?

Yeah. So I think that this is possibly not something that will go down well in the copyright law courts, but I think what I think that the neuroscience actually tells us is that there's a much blurrier line between originality and plagiarism. and I think that you can make sense of this idea, I think, if you think about how your brain is perceiving in the first place. So what I've tried to outline so far is that your brain is sort of in the process of taking in the world around it,

absorbing the patterns of it encounters, and then using those to make predictions about what should come next. Now, that can seem a little bit mechanical to begin with, because it would seem like all you can ever do is just recycle the patterns you've seen in the past, you're always just going to be, if this was strictly true, you'd just kind of be a full-blown plagiarism machine. You'd just completely regurgitate everything that the past had given you. You wouldn't be able to come up with anything new. I think, though, that possibly the kind of the sort of secret source of how this process gives you something new

is due to the variability you have in your own mind and brain. I think there's a really nice analogy you could draw between the process of creativity in an individual mind and the process of evolution that you'd recognize from like biology. This isn't an analogy that I've coined myself. It's something that the evolutionary epistemologists, particularly inspired by the work of Donald Campbell, were interested in. And this was this idea that in the same way that you can look at the natural world and see this rich diversity. You know, originally, you know, when people saw the rich diversity of the world, they thought that must mean that there was an omniscient creator, that the reason why you had such these kind of intricately designed creatures fit to their

environments must have been there was some creative source behind it. But what the insights of kind of evolutionary biology tell us is that it's possible that a process of replication with a small amount of variability, a small amount of mutation, gives you the ability to, in the process of regurgitating, of replicating, creating, creating things that are different. And I think possibly the same thing happens in our own minds that we are absorbing those patterns. And that gives us this kind of mutant pool of ideas that we can have our own kind of creative evolution from. So we've covered an awful lot there. And I think perhaps some people hearing some of these ideas for the first time might be a little bit unnerved.

I might think, well, you know, I'm not who I am, who I thought I was. After all, so what can we say to sort of reassure those people? You know, there's nothing strange about them. No, there's definitely nothing strange about them. I mean, I think that probably if you were to come to the corridor in my department, you'd find people who've made a career about questioning the existential mysteries of their minds. So there were lots of them around. But I think that the key thing I would probably say is don't have nightmares. This process that's giving you these theories and expectations,

it's not malevolent, it's not trying to fool you. It's the process through which you take the world that you've lived in in the past and you use it to make sense of the present. And often it helps you. It's a key ingredient to what makes your mind function. I think, though, it's also important to think that you don't need to think that these predictions are always fixed. That in the same way that science never stops and that the history of science is that we

have theories that seem unassailable and then something surprising happens that kicks them out of favor and we have a new paradigm instead. If your brain is like a scientist, that process of paradigm building and paradigm shifting will also be unfolding in you too. So it might be that you aren't the person that you thought you were, but that might not be a bad thing because it might mean that there's a chance that you'll end up predicting yourself into someone new. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Daniel Yoff. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, A Trick of the Mind, How the Brain Invents Your Reality.

If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC ScienceFocus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or downloaders on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focus. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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