Our Brains Aren't As Smart As You Think

We like to believe that our brains are reliable. No one wants to believe they’re being misled by their own brain. The fact that what we see might not be true, what we remember might not have happened and what we feel might just be an illusion makes us uncomfortable. It is indeed very true and takes a much bigger part in our lives than you would think. Our brains aren’t machines, they aren’t calculators and they are certainly not objective. The human mind is like a master of storytelling, and it likes to make changes in the story if that’s the way to write a better one. Our cognitive system isn’t smart enough to understand everything that’s happening around you, so the organ in charge likes to be lazy and fill in gaps or take shortcuts. Sometimes, it’d rather give us a convincing answer than a correct one. So what does this look like in real life?

One of the simplest examples is also one of the strangest. We all have those early childhood memories that we’re not even sure if they actually happened, let alone being sure of how. Our memory isn’t a recording system. The brain doesn’t record memories like a video. Instead, it collects pieces from the moment, such as your feelings, the environment and the main point. However, most details aren’t captured. When our mind recalls a memory, it doesn’t take it straight out of the archive, but it rebuilds it according to certain pieces of the memory. The main idea stays the same, but everything around it gets improved and rebuilt every time you remember that moment. The brain always tries to form meaningful stories, even if that means the memory has to be falsified.

Another example occurs due to a glitch in our nerves. Have you ever started sneezing when you’re exposed to bright light? This reflex has an odd, but logical explanation. Normally, we sneeze when there is irritation inside our nose. That stimulates our nerves, and our brain orders us to sneeze. So, light has nothing to do with it. But the whole issue starts at the nerves. Even though the information of light and the reflex of sneezing are connected to different nerves, these two nerves pass over extremely close areas of the brain. So sometimes, when the optical nerve gets overstimulated, the stimulation is transferred to the adjacent nerve. As a result, brain interprets the situation wrongly and activates the sneezing reflex.

Likewise, human mind relies heavily on interpretations about visual information as well. All the optical illusions we come across show that our eyes can sometimes cooperate with our brain to mislead us. In the visual world light constantly changes, objects overlap and depth doesn’t stay clear. Our brain uses rules to clear up that chaos. Optical illusions utilize these rules to trick. For example, a stable picture might look like it’s moving, straight lines might look curvy because of the background or two objects of the same size might look different because of what’s around them.

As we see, the human mind is occasionally wrong. But when we look at the little tricks it pulls, it all looks like a harmless defense mechanism that can’t keep up with everything around us at times. Our brains were never designed to be perfect, and their sole purpose is to help us survive. They might be paranoid here and there, to make sure we keep moving and surviving. And most of the time, that works.