We're All Living in Different Realities (Literally)
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. And today, we're talking about why we're all living in different realities. Alright. Quick question.
Leslie Poston:What sound do you hear when I say b a? Ba. Simple. Right? You heard me say ba.
Leslie Poston:But what if I told you that if you were watching someone say g a, ga, while hearing that exact same ba sound, most of you would swear you heard d a, d a. This is called the McGurk effect, and it's one of the most elegant demonstrations that your brain isn't a camera or a microphone. It's more of a prediction machine. Your visual system, watching lips move, literally overrides the sound waves hitting your eardrums. Your brain sees gah, hears bah, and splits the difference, constructing dah.
Leslie Poston:About twenty percent of you won't experience this effect at all. Same sound, same video, completely different perception. Because our brains are individually calibrated prediction engines, and we're all running slightly different software. There is another example of this called BrainStorm Green Needle. Same thing where you have an audio clip, but if you're expecting to hear BrainStorm, you hear brainstorm.
Leslie Poston:If you're expecting to hear green needle, you hear green needle. Your expectation literally changes the acoustic experience. Today, we're going to dismantle the idea that perception is passive, that your brain is just faithfully recording reality because it's not. Your brain is constantly generating predictions about what's coming next and then checking those predictions against incoming sensory data. And then when there's a mismatch, sometimes your brain updates its prediction.
Leslie Poston:But often, it just overrides the data and shows you what it expected anyway. This means that you and I can witness the exact same event. The same photons hitting our retinas, the same sound waves hitting our eardrums, and can construct genuinely fundamentally different experiences of what happened, not different interpretations, different perceptions. Just a note, this episode is a bit longer than usual since we're going to build a complete picture of how this works. How your brain builds reality from predictions.
Leslie Poston:How your body state, whether you're hungry, exhausted, or anxious, literally tunes what you perceive. How your culture gives you a specific set of expectations before you're even aware that you're predicting anything, how memory isn't recording but reconstruction, how neurotypes like autism or conditions like schizophrenia and depression involve differences in these prediction parameters and how algorithms and deepfakes are now manipulating this aspect of our brains in ways that have profound implications for our society. This isn't just a fun neuroscience fact. This is why two people can watch the same video of a police encounter and see completely different things, why eyewitness testimony puts innocent people in prison, why you and your partner can remember the same conversation totally differently and both be absolutely certain that you're right. Why political polarization feels so intractable.
Leslie Poston:Because we're not just disagreeing about how to interpret reality, we're literally inhabiting different realities constructed from different information streams. So buckle up. We're about to learn how brains build worlds, why you can't trust your own perception, and what you can actually do about it. So what's actually happening when your brain constructs reality? The dominant framework in cognitive neuroscience right now is broadly called predictive processing or active inference.
Leslie Poston:Some researchers also call it the Bayesian brain hypothesis, and there's a more mathematical version called the free energy principle. These are all related ideas that share a core insight. Your brain isn't passively recording the world. It's actively predicting it. Here's how it works.
Leslie Poston:Your brain has a model of the world built from everything you've experienced up to this moment. That model generates top down predictions based on everything I know. Here's what should happen next. Meanwhile, bottom up sensory signals are coming in. The actual photons, sound waves, and pressure on your skin.
Leslie Poston:Your brain is constantly comparing these two streams and calculating prediction errors, the difference between what it expected and what it got. When prediction errors are small, your brain mostly shows you what it predicted. When they're large, it updates the model. This is perception. Learning.
Leslie Poston:It's how your brain minimizes surprise. But your brain doesn't weight all signals equally. It uses something called precision weighting, essentially a confidence dial on different information streams. High precision means trust this signal. Low precision means probably noise, ignore it.
Leslie Poston:This is why you can hear your name across a crowded room even when there's tons of other noise. Your brain assigns high precision to self relevant information. But it's also why you can completely miss someone calling your name when you're deeply focused on your work. In that context, your brain has turned down the precision on external audio. Or think about reading.
Leslie Poston:You can read the typo, I love Paris in the the spring correctly as I love Paris in the spring, completely missing that the word the appears twice because your brain predicted the sentence structure and didn't bother to carefully process each word. It assigned low precision to the actual visual input because its prediction was so confident. The critical part to this is that your brain doesn't just passively predict. It acts to make its predictions come true. This is the active inference part.
Leslie Poston:When you reach for a coffee cup, your brain isn't sending motor commands to your arm. It's predicting what it would feel like to be holding the cup and then minimizing the prediction error between that prediction and your current proprioceptive state. Your arm moves because your brain is trying to make the predicted sensation real. This sounds abstract, but it has some profound implications. It means perception and action are fundamentally the same process.
Leslie Poston:Both are about minimizing prediction error, and it means that what you perceive isn't some objective readout of the world. It's your brain's best guess about what's out there based on its model weighted by its confidence in different signals. Now, I should mention, this framework is very influential and well supported by a lot of neuroscience research, but it's not without debate. Some researchers argue it's too broad, or that we still need to work out the details of exactly how the brain implements these computations. And there are complementary frameworks that emphasize the role of the body and environment even more.
Leslie Poston:But for understanding why we construct different realities, this predictive processing lens gives us a powerful set of tools. Remember the McGurk effect from a minute ago? That's precision waiting in action. When visual and auditory signals conflict, your brain has to decide which one to trust more. For most people in clear viewing conditions, visual speech gets weighted heavily.
Leslie Poston:So the visual gah overrides the auditory bah, and you hear dah. But for that twenty percent who don't experience the effect, their brains are weighting the signals differently. Same input, different precision settings, different reality. Now where did these predictions come from? They come from your priors, everything your brain has learned about how the world works.
Leslie Poston:You've learned that objects fall down, not up, that faces have two eyes, that words follow certain patterns. These priors shape every prediction your brain makes. And this is where things get a little more complex because priors aren't universal. They're shaped by your specific history of experiences, your location, your culture, your body, even your attention patterns, which means we're all running slightly different prediction models on the same sensory input. We'll unpack exactly how that works in the next segments, but for now, here's the key takeaway.
Leslie Poston:Your brain is a prediction machine that's constantly generating expectations, weighting incoming signals by confidence, and constructing your perceptual experience from that interaction. You're not seeing the world as it is you're seeing your brain's best hypothesis about what's out there. And that hypothesis can be very, very different from someone else's. So we've established that your brain is constantly predicting what comes next. Now let's talk about what determines which predictions get made in the first place.
Leslie Poston:The answer is attention. Attention and the framework we're using today is essentially the allocation of precision. What you attend to is what your brain decides to weight heavily in its prediction error calculations. What you ignore gets low precision, treated as noise. This has a striking consequence.
Leslie Poston:If you're not predicting something, you might not perceive it at all, even if it's right in front of you. One of the more famous demonstrations of this is the invisible gorilla study. People watched a video of students passing basketballs and counted the number of passes. Midway through, someone in a gorilla suit walks through the scene, stops, beats their chest, and walks off. About half of viewers completely missed it.
Leslie Poston:Not didn't notice it, literally did not see it. Because they were predicting basketball passes, their attention allocated precision to ball movements. And the gorilla, totally unexpected, didn't even make it into their constructed reality. Or take change blindness. People miss huge changes to images, a plane engine appearing or disappearing, buildings changing color.
Leslie Poston:If the change happens during a brief disruption. You're not predicting a change, so your brain doesn't allocate the precision needed to detect it. There's also something called attentional blink. If you're watching for a target in a rapid stream of images, and a second target appears within about a half a second of the first, you'll often miss the second one completely. Your prediction machinery is still processing the first target and hasn't allocated precision to detecting another one yet.
Leslie Poston:Here's why this matters. This isn't just about visual tricks. This is about how belief shapes perception at a fundamental level. If you're predicting or expecting certain things, you'll notice evidence for them. If you're not predicting something, even clear evidence might not register.
Leslie Poston:This is confirmation bias, but not the way we usually think about it and not the way we've talked about it on previous episodes. It's not that you're consciously ignoring contradictory evidence. It's that your attention, your precision allocation is literally preventing that evidence from becoming part of your perceptual experience. You're just not seeing it in the first place. So here's the implication.
Leslie Poston:Eyewitness testimony, which we rely on in courtrooms and news reporting and everyday credibility judgments, is deeply unreliable. If a witness wasn't expecting to see something, even something important, even if it's right in front of them, their brain may not have constructed that perceptual experience. They're not lying when they say they didn't see it. It genuinely wasn't in their reality. Their attention spotlight didn't illuminate, so their prediction engine didn't build it.
Leslie Poston:And this is happening to all of us all the time. Right now, you're missing most of what's in your environment because your brain isn't predicting it, isn't allocating precision to it. You're perceiving a tiny curated slice of available information, the slice your current predictions and attention patterns have constructed. That's one reason our attention is such a hot commodity in the digital programs, apps, games, and platforms that we interact with. Different predictions, different attention, different slice, different reality.
Leslie Poston:Now let's add another layer. Your body is constantly voting on your reality. There's this concept in neuroscience called interoception, your brain's model of your body's internal state. How fast is your heart beating? How much energy do you have?
Leslie Poston:Are you in pain, hungry, anxious? These aren't just background sensations. They're signals that directly tune your prediction machinery. Research shows that people who are better at detecting their own heartbeat, what's called interoceptive accuracy, show measurably different responses to threat and ambiguity. Their prediction engines are getting different information from their bodies, which changes how they weight external signals.
Leslie Poston:If your heart is racing, your brain upweights predictions about threat. Ambiguous faces look angrier. Neutral situations feel more dangerous. This isn't bias in the sense of being wrong it's Bayesian inference. A racing heart is evidence that something might be threatening, so your brain rationally updates its predictions.
Leslie Poston:But your heart might be racing because you just climbed stairs or had an extra cup of coffee or didn't sleep well. Your prediction engine doesn't necessarily know why. It just knows elevated heart rate. Better be alert for threats. So it turns your precision settings accordingly, and suddenly your perceptual reality has more threat in it.
Leslie Poston:Hunger works the same way. When you're hungry, food related words literally pop out faster in visual search tasks. Your brain has allocated higher precision to food cues. You're not choosing to notice food more. Your prediction machinery has been retuned by your body state.
Leslie Poston:Sleep deprivation shifts interpretation of ambiguous stimuli toward negative readings. Anxiety cranks up threat detection. Physical pain increases irritability and decreases patience, which are really just shifts in how your brain is weighting social predictions. Even your body mapyour sense of where your body is and what it can dois constructed through prediction. The rubber hand delusion demonstrates this beautifully.
Leslie Poston:If you watch a rubber hand being stroked while your real hand is stroked in sync, your brain starts to predict that the rubber hand is yours. It incorporates it into your body model. You'll actually flinch if someone threatens the rubber hand. Your temperature will change in the real hand if the rubber hand is put in ice. Your constructed reality now includes a rubber hand as part of your body.
Leslie Poston:And then there's the placebo and nocebo effects. If you believe a pill will reduce your pain, your brain predicts reduced pain, which actually changes your physiological pain processing. The prediction literally alters the reality. Same with nocebo effect. If you expect side effects, your brain predicts them and often produces them.
Leslie Poston:So before you make an important decision, check your body state. Are you hungry? When did you last sleep? Are you anxious about something unrelated? This is one reason judges give harsher sentences before lunch, and medical residents make worse diagnostic decisions after twenty four hour shifts.
Leslie Poston:Not because they're bad people or bad doctors, but because their bodies are tuning their prediction engines toward different settings. Your stomach, your heart rate, your sleep debt, they're all voting on what reality you construct. And most of the time, you have no idea it's happening. So we've established that your perception of the present is a construction based on predictions. Here's a slightly unsettling note.
Leslie Poston:Your memory of the past is too. Memory is not a recording it's a reconstruction. Every time you remember something, your brain is rebuilding that experience from fragments, using your current priors to fill in the gaps. Decades of research have demonstrated this with the misinformation effect. Show people a video of a car accident and later ask half of them how fast were the cars going when they hit each other, and ask the other half how for how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other.
Leslie Poston:The smashed group remembers the cars going faster. They're also more likely to remember seeing broken glass that wasn't there. The words smashed activated different priors, more violent priors, which were then incorporated into the reconstructed memory. You can nudge people into entirely false memories with the right suggestion. People have been convinced they were lost in a shopping mall as a child when it never happened.
Leslie Poston:Convinced they saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, which is impossible because Bugs Bunny is Warner Brothers. The mechanism for this is called memory reconsolidation. Research shows that every time you recall a memory, it becomes briefly unstable, modifiable before being stored again. Every recall is a rewrite opportunity, which means the more you remember something, the more chances you've had to edit it. And you're editing based on your current priors, your current emotional state, and your current narrative about yourself.
Leslie Poston:This is why two people can remember the same conversation completely differently and both be absolutely certain that they're right. They're not arguing about what happened. They're arguing about two genuinely different reconstructed memories, both built from fragments and predictions. Studies on flashbulb memories, those vivid memories of exactly where you were during major events, show this clearly. Nineeleven, for example.
Leslie Poston:People are incredibly confident in these memories, and they're incredibly wrong. When researchers compare people's immediate reports to their memories years later, the details have changed dramatically, but the confidence has not. Confidence is not correlated with accuracy and memory at all. So here's what this means practically: In legal proceedings, therapy, family disputes, anywhere the past matters, we need to remember that remembering is a creative act. It's your prediction engine running backwards, filling in gaps with what seems plausible now based on who you are now.
Leslie Poston:Your memory is not lying to you. It's doing exactly what it evolved to do, constructing a coherent narrative from incomplete information. But that narrative is a construction, not a recording. And every time you remember, you're reconstructing, editing, and rewriting. Your past, like your present, is a prediction.
Leslie Poston:So we're halfway through our segments today, and we've seen how attention, body state, and memory shape constructed reality. Now let's talk about how culture preloads your prediction engine before you're even aware you're perceiving anything. Language is a big part of this. There's research on Russian speakers that's really revealing. Russian has two separate words for light blue and dark blue, and apologies if I'm butchering the pronunciation.
Leslie Poston:Those words are and with no umbrella term for blue. English, however, lumps them together. When you show Russian speakers two shades of blue and ask them to distinguish them quickly, they're faster if the shades cross the boundary than if they're both the same category. English speakers show no difference. Now Russian speakers can obviously perceive the difference between shades of blue within a category.
Leslie Poston:It's not that the language creates the ability to see, but the language shapes attention allocation, which differences get high precision, which get low. The linguistic categories tune your prediction machinery to notice certain boundaries more readily. And this extends far beyond color. Language has been described as cognitive technology, a tool that literally tunes your prediction engine. The words you have available shape which predictions you generate easily and which require effort.
Leslie Poston:Culture shapes predictions even more broadly. Research shows us that when viewing scenes, East Asian participants encode more contextual information, relationships between objects, backgrounds, and settings, while Western participants focus more on individual objects. Here's something else to note. Almost everything we know about how human perception works comes from studies on what we call weird population. That's weird in all caps.
Leslie Poston:It stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. This was documented in a 2010 paper I'll put in the show notes. This means that as of 2010, 96% of psychology research participants came from populations representing 12% of humanity. And weird populations are statistical outliers on many measures. They're more individualistic, more analytical in visual perception, different moral reasoning, and even different spatial cognition.
Leslie Poston:We've built an entire field by studying the exceptions and calling them universal. Then we export findings, design technology, education systems, healthcare protocols based on this research, and we act surprised when they don't work elsewhere. This isn't just an academic problem. When AI is trained on data from weird populations, it encodes weird priors. When medical diagnosis criteria are based on how symptoms present in Western population, other presentations get missed.
Leslie Poston:When universal design principles reflect Western attentional patterns, they're creating barriers for everyone else. Your culture doesn't just influence how you interpret reality. It preloads the prediction machinery that constructs reality in the first place. It gives you a specific set of priors about what's important, what to attend to, and how to carve up experience into categories before you're conscious of perceiving anything. You inherit a reality model, and that model may be radically different from someone else's, not because one is wrong, but because you've been trained on different data.
Leslie Poston:Let's talk about what happens when the parameters of that prediction machinery are set differently at a more fundamental level. I want to be really careful with framing here. We're not talking about broken brains. We're talking about different precision settings, different updating dynamics, different prediction parameters, different, not deficient. Let's start with people operating with an autistic neurotype, because this is where the research has really evolved recently.
Leslie Poston:For a long time, the dominant theory was weak priors or attenuated priors, the idea that autistic brains don't weight past experience heavily, leading to overreliance on current sensory input. But recent research from 2025 shows it's even more nuanced than that. The findings indicate that autistic adults don't have weak priors. They have different updating dynamics. Specifically, they rely more heavily on sensory input when iteratively updating their beliefs about what's happening.
Leslie Poston:This leads to slower adaptation early in a session. It takes longer to build up stable predictions, but eventually reaches similar integration to neurotypical brains. It's not that the priors are weak, It's that the updating algorithm is just tuned a little differently. And this explains a lot. It explains why unexpected changes can be so overwhelming.
Leslie Poston:If your updating dynamics are slower, of course, you need more time to integrate new patterns. It explains why routines are so important. Routines reduce the need for constant updating. But it also explains exceptional abilities in pattern detection and detail orientation. If you're weighting sensory input more heavily, you're catching details others miss.
Leslie Poston:For psychosis and schizophrenia, the picture is different. Recent research here suggests aberrant precision weighting, specifically overconfident predictions that override sensory input. Hallucinations may be predictions that are weighted so heavily, assigned such high precision, that they're experienced as perception even without corresponding sensory input. The prediction becomes the reality. Delusions may be high precision priors that are resistant to prediction error.
Leslie Poston:New evidence should update the belief, but the prior is weighted so heavily that the brain explains away the contradiction instead. And for depression, research shows systematically negative priors biasing interpretation of ambiguous information. This isn't just pessimism or thinking negatively. It's Bayesian inference with systematically biased input weights. When something ambiguous happens, someone doesn't text back, a project has mixed results, A social interaction is unclear.
Leslie Poston:A depressive brain might predict negative interpretations with higher confidence and then selectively attend to prediction errors that confirm those negative predictions, further entrenching them. Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, may be reduced precision on reward prediction. If your brain assigns low confidence to predictions about positive outcomes, you stop generating these predictions, which means you stop acting to pursue rewards. So here's why this framework matters clinically. If autistic sensory overwhelm comes from different updating dynamics rather than a broken system, accommodation should focus on reducing the need for rapid updating.
Leslie Poston:Predictable environments, clear transitions, adequate processing time, clear instructions, not forcing neurotypical updating speed. For depression, if negative priors are the core issue, treatment would need to do more than think positive. It needs to systematically retrain the prediction engine with experiences that generate positive prediction errorsactual evidence that contradicts the negative predictionsand that's weighted heavily enough to update the priors. Understanding these as differences in predictive processing parameters, not deficits, suggests new intervention targets and more respectful, effective support. All right.
Leslie Poston:So we've built up from individual prediction engines through body states, culture, and clinical differences. Now let's talk about what happens when your information environment gets deliberately manipulated. First, algorithmic priors. Your social media feed, your search results, your recommended content. These aren't neutral windows into reality.
Leslie Poston:They're personalized prediction engines trained on your past behavior, and they function like external priors. They curate what prediction errors you encounter. If your feed consistently shows you economic recovery stories and someone else's feed shows recession stories, you're not just getting different news. You're getting different evidence bases. And from those different evidence bases, you're rationally constructing different predictions about the economy.
Leslie Poston:This is going beyond filter bubbles and echo chambers. These are reality bubbles. Different sensory diets creating different priors, creating different rational conclusions. Research from 2018 found that exposing people to opposing viewpoints on social media sometimes increases polarization rather than reducing it. Why?
Leslie Poston:Because if the prediction error is too large, if the information is too far from your existing priors, your brain struggles to integrate it. It gets rejected as noise or explained away. Recent work shows that sharing itself can become habitual, an automatic behavior that bypasses accuracy evaluation. Your precision waiting on truth declines when sharing is driven by habit rather than deliberation. Let's talk about virtual and augmented reality.
Leslie Poston:Why does VR feel real? Because it provides sensory motor contingencies that match your predictions. You turn your head, the visual world updates accordingly. You reach out and you see your hand move. Your prediction errors are minimized, so your brain accepts the virtual environment as real.
Leslie Poston:This is called place illusion, the sense of being in a location, and it depends entirely on your prediction machinery being satisfied. When sensory motor contingencies break, where there's lag or movements don't match predictions, presence collapses. This has therapeutic potential. VR exposure therapy works because your brain treats the virtual spider or virtual height as real enough to generate a fear response and, through repeated exposure, potentially update threat predictions. It also means that we can hack presence.
Leslie Poston:We can create experiences that feel completely real even though they're entirely synthetic. And that brings us around to deep audio and video that's been synthesized or manipulated to show something that never happened. And here's what matters. A 2024 meta analysis found that humans are at approximately chance accuracy for detecting high quality deepfakes. That means fifty fifty, a coin flip.
Leslie Poston:Voice cloning is even harder to detect than visual deepfakes because your prediction machinery expects voice to match identity, and when it does, you trust it. Why do deepfakes work so well? Because they provide exactly the sensorimotor contingencies your prediction engine expects. Lips sync up with words. Prosody matches emotion.
Leslie Poston:The prediction errors are minimal, so your brain constructs this is real. The consequences are severe. Deep fake pornography overwhelmingly targets women creating synthetic sexual content without consent. Voice clones are used for fraud, scammers calling elderly people, faking a grandchild's voice, asking for bail money. Political deepfakes create false evidence of statements or actions that never occurred.
Leslie Poston:There are regulatory efforts emerging. Open letters urging deepfake regulation were published in 2024, but overall legislation is far behind the technology. And here's the uncomfortable truth. If you're confident you can spot a deepfake, you're probably wrong. Your prediction engine evolved to trust sensory motor contingencies, and deepfakes exploit exactly that trust.
Leslie Poston:Meanwhile, algorithms are feeding you a personalized evidence diet that makes your prior beliefs seem increasingly obviously correct. You're not in a filter bubble. You're in a reality bubble where the prediction errors you encounter have been curated to confirm your existing model. And when democratic society depends on a shared factual foundation, when we need to agree on what happened before we can debate what to do about it, this is potentially an existential crisis. We're not just disagreeing about interpretation.
Leslie Poston:We're constructing fundamentally different realities from corrupted, manipulated information systems. So what happens when people with genuinely different constructed realities try to communicate? First, understand that collective reality construction is a thing. Groups synchronize their priors through shared attention, repeated narratives, and social learning. They watch the same media, hear the same stories, attend to the same cues, and gradually their prediction engines align.
Leslie Poston:This is how cultures form and how communities function. Shared reality enables coordination. But it also means that when information environments diverge, group realities diverge. On a small scale, this shows up in relationships. You never told me that fights aren't usually about lying.
Leslie Poston:They're about failed shared reality construction. One person constructed a memory of telling you. The other person didn't construct a memory of being told. Both reconstructed memories feel absolutely certain. You're not arguing about what happened.
Leslie Poston:You're arguing about two different reconstruction. Couples therapy in this framework is partially about prior alignment, getting two prediction engines to construct more similar realities going forward. But the stakes get much higher when we zoom out. There's a concept in philosophy called epistemic injustice where some groups' knowledge and testimony are systematically discounted or dismissed. Medical gaslighting of women is a clear example of Women report pain.
Leslie Poston:Doctors, whose priors about credible pain presentations were trained mostly on male patients, assign low precision to those reports. The women's constructed reality includes severe pain. The doctor's constructed reality includes exaggeration or psychological causes. Different priors, different precision weighting, different realities. And the one with institutional power gets enforced as truth.
Leslie Poston:This happens in police interactions as well. Different priors about threat mean that officers and civilians construct genuinely different realities from the same encounter. An officer's prediction engine trained on threat indicators assigns high precision to certain movements, certain demographics. A civilian's prediction engine trained on everyday behavior constructs those same actions as nonthreatening. Both realities feel obvious.
Leslie Poston:Both feel objective. It also happens in workplaces. Cultural priors mean that identical behavior gets constructed as assertive from one person and aggressive from another, as thorough from one demographic and nitpicky from another, and it scales to entire political systems. Truth decay, the collapse of shared factual foundations, happens when information ecosystems diverge enough that groups are constructing incommensurable realities, not just different interpretations of agreed upon facts, different facts, different evidence, different rational conclusions from different constructed worlds. And here's what's critical to understand.
Leslie Poston:This asymmetry in whose reality counts as real is a primary mechanism of oppression. When doctors don't believe women's pain, when police see threat and moral behavior, when indigenous knowledge gets dismissed as anecdotal while Western science is always trusted as objective, when non weird perceptual patterns are pathologized, that's not bias in the usual sense. That's one group's priors, one group's precision settings, one group's constructed reality being enforced as objective truth. Everyone else's realities get marked as subjective, unreliable, and mistaken. So political polarization isn't just that we disagree about solutions.
Leslie Poston:It's that we're constructing different realities from different information streams filtered through different cultural priors, weighted by different attention patterns. You're not convincing someone to interpret the same thing differently. You're trying to convince them to see a different thing altogether, and whose reality gets to be reality is always a question of power. Alright. We've spent nine segments dismantling the idea that perception is objective.
Leslie Poston:So what do we actually do with this? Because you can't step outside your prediction engine. You can't perceive without predicting. But you can make your brain more flexible, more accurate, and more open to update. Here are five concrete skills.
Leslie Poston:First, name your priors explicitly. Before you form an opinion on something, force yourself to articulate, I'm predicting x because of prior experiences y. Just making them visible makes them revisable. If you can't name the priors underlying a belief, that's a red flag that you're running on autopilot. Second, ask, what would I notice if I were wrong?
Leslie Poston:This forces you to specify what prediction errors would actually update your belief. If you can't answer, no evidence could change your mind, that's not a prior. It's an unfalsifiable ideology. Real priors generate testable predictions. Third, the reality check ritual.
Leslie Poston:Before important decisions, run through this. Check your body state. Are you hungry, exhausted, or anxious? Those are tuning your precision settings right now. Then list your current priors explicitly.
Leslie Poston:Then seek one strong source that challenges them, not to abandon your belief, but to generate a genuine prediction error and see if your model survives contact with it. Four, steel man listening. When someone seems completely unreasonable, ask yourself. What priors would make their response rational? Try to reconstruct their prediction engine, not to agree with them, but to understand that they're running a different model on different data and getting output that makes sense within that framework.
Leslie Poston:Fifth, update publicly. When you change your mind, say so. Model that updating on prediction errors is intellectual strength, not weakness. We need to normalize prior revision. For media hygiene specifically, diversify your feed algorithmically.
Leslie Poston:Use a trustworthy VPN and try surfing the Internet from different countries to get a broader perspective in your feed. Actively follow sources that challenge your existing priors. Follow at least one person who annoys you but engages honestly. Before you share something, pause and do one disconfirming search. Actively look for the strongest case against what you're about to share.
Leslie Poston:Seek original sources instead of aggregators. In fact, I recommend actively blocking aggregator accounts and AI generated content accounts on social media. And periodically, do information fasting. Disconnect entirely for a day or so just to reset your algorithmic baseline. And now let's talk ethics because this all has life or death stakes.
Leslie Poston:In health care, women and minorities get diagnosed slower and treated less aggressively because of biased priors about credible symptom presentation. Pain management shows massive disparities. Mental health conditions get misdiagnosed across cultures because diagnostic criteria encode weird priors. We need systematic debiasing training for clinicians and diverse data sets for AI diagnostics. In criminal justice, eyewitness testimony is putting innocent people in prison because we don't understand memory reconstruction.
Leslie Poston:Racial bias and threat perception by police and juries leads to different constructed realities of the same encounter and unjust outcomes. We need judicial education on perception science, body camera requirements, and reform of how eyewitness testimony is weighted. In democracy, electoral misinformation and deepfakes are creating manufactured realities that are indistinguishable from authentic evidence. Epistemic polarization is preventing any shared factual foundation for deliberation. We need media literacy education starting young, regulation of synthetic media, and platform accountability for algorithmic amplification.
Leslie Poston:And there's a consent crisis we need to name explicitly. Deepfake pornography is a reality violation. Someone's face and voice used to construct synthetic experiences they never participated in or consented to. Voice cloning enables fraud that exploits trust. We need a right to your reality framework and criminal penalties for malicious deep vics.
Leslie Poston:Here's the ethical core. Epistemic humility doesn't mean all realities are equal. Some models are better calibrated to predictive success than others. Science works because it's a systematic method for updating priors based on prediction errors. But epistemic humility does mean recognizing that your reality is a construction, not the territory, that someone else's different construction isn't necessarily wrong.
Leslie Poston:It may be built from different, equally valid inputs. And that when your constructed reality consistently aligns with institutional power while others don't, you have an obligation to examine whether your priors are actually superior or just dominant. Remember where we started? The McGurk effect. You heard duh because your brain integrated visual and auditory streams.
Leslie Poston:Now you know that integration is shaped by your body, your culture, your attention, your past experiences, your information environment, and whether algorithms have decided what you should see. Different inputs, different priors, different predictions, different constructed realities. The hopeful part? Once you understand that perception is constructed, you can start examining the construction process and adjust your priors. You can diversify your inputs, and you can check your body state before decisions.
Leslie Poston:You can seek disconfirming evidence and recognize when someone else's reality, even if it's different from yours, is built on a foundation you'd find rational if you had their data. Your action item for the week. Pick one belief you hold strongly. Write down the priors underlying it. What experiences shaped those priors?
Leslie Poston:What information stream maintains them? And then ask, what would I need to see to update this belief? And then actively seek one high quality source that challenges it. Not to abandon that belief necessarily, but to test whether it survives contact with genuine prediction errors and to see if your mental model is robust or brittle. Because every unjust verdict based on flawed eyewitness testimony, every medical dismissal of reported pain, every algorithmic deepfake, every unnecessary use of force based on misperceived threat, these are failures of reality construction with life or death consequences.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to this episode of Psyber Space. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. And remember, we're all living in different realities, but we don't have to stay trapped in them. Stay curious to avoid that trap. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss a week.
Leslie Poston:And send this to a friend if you think they'd like a reality check.
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