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Most of us go through life assuming that what we see around us is reality. That’s a table. There’s a tree. We hear words spoken to us. An hour passes on the clock we see. Our brain takes in all of this, and we experience it. Except, from the standpoint of neuroscience, that’s not really what’s happening. In fact, the brain doesn’t give us an unedited picture of the world. It filters a remarkable amount of information, picks out what it thinks matters, combines that with what we already know and expect, and gives us something closer to a working model of reality. Yikes! You mean there’s nothing “out there” to be perceived other than our own perceptions?
Pretty much yes, in some sense, that’s a true statement, and it all starts with our senses. Human vision detects only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our hearing also has limits. Even with the things our senses can detect, most never get to our conscious awareness. The brain must be selective, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed by information and pretty much incapable of doing anything. Then something even more astounding happens. What we expect to see can influence what we actually perceive. Neuroscience research has shown that prior expectations affect the brain’s processing of incoming information delivered by the senses. The brain continually pulls out previous experiences to make predictions about what’s out there and compares those with the information coming in.
Role of Expectations and Beliefs in Shaping Perception
So perception isn’t just information coming from the outside world into the brain. There’s traffic, like you would see on a massive highway, going in both directions. Our prior experiences, expectations and learned beliefs all become part of that traffic. They influence what we notice and how we interpret what we run into in our daily lives.
Think about beliefs rattling around in your brain for years: I’m not a good writer. I’m not good at math. I’m not popular. I’m just the way I am, and too old to learn that. I don’t belong with those people. I’m not good enough. After enough repetition, we stop experiencing these statements as beliefs. To us, they become facts about who we think we are—and how we show up in the world. This is where adding training and exposure to the mix gets interesting. If our brains use previous experience to interpret what’s possible right now, then serving up to the brain brand new experiences can start to change the predictions it makes. But don’t believe that you can just talk yourself into the new belief becoming your reality. The way to do it is to practice something, expose yourself to people and environments that are the counterfactuals of your assumptions, and accumulate evidence that our old model is incomplete. Do that, and you can rid yourself of that pesky recurring thought, “I’m not enough.”
Moreover, meditation can help a lot with this, by training brain activity to operate on new patterns. For example, there’s a part of the brain called the “default mode network.” It’s a group of connected areas in the brain that becomes really active when our attention turns inward, such as when we’re thinking about ourselves, remembering our past, imagining our future, or replaying the ongoing story we carry about who we are. Research suggests that meditation can change both the activity within this network and how its different regions communicate with one another. Said another way, with training, we may be able to become a little less captive to the running commentary in our heads about who we are.
Subjective vs. Objective Time Perception
And then there’s the issue of time. We live our lives in physical bodies which exist in space and time, and our brains organise how and what we experience accordingly. Events happen somewhere. One thing happens before another. We remember the past and wonder about the future. This ordering the brain does is essential for us to function in the world. But clock time and psychological time are two very different things. Five minutes waiting for life-altering medical news doesn’t pass in the same way as five minutes having dinner with your loved ones. Research confirms what we already know from experience: subjective time is surprisingly elastic. Attention, emotion, motivation, and what we’re doing all change how long an interval of time feels.
That suggests we have some ability to influence our experience of time. When we focus our attention on time itself, time feels like it’s passing more slowly. When we’re not focusing on anything, like being absorbed in a project or conversation, it feels like it’s passing more quickly. Research on subjective time has found that directing our attention toward time can expand its perceived duration, while directing attention away from it can contract it.
Influencing the Perception of Time and Reality
Which gives us something really practical to work with. If I want an anticipated experience to feel even more pleasurable while you’re living it, deliberately bring your attention back to what’s happening in the moment: the conversation, the music, the feeling of a breeze blowing on your skin, the face you see across the table. If we want an unpleasant time in our lives to pass faster, absorb yourself doing something else. We can also become more conscious of the assumptions we have about our lives. Maybe some of what we experience as the fixed nature of reality is instead only the structure through which our human brains have learned to perceive it.
Neuroscience doesn’t suggest we can think our way completely outside the bounds of physical time or change the laws of physics. But it does tell us something valuable: our experience of reality is constructed by us, selected by us, and surprisingly changeable—by us. We may not be able to change reality with a snap of our fingers. But by focusing our attention and practicing, we can change some of the filters through which we experience it. And that may give us a lot more room to become a different person than our old beliefs told us we were, or insisted we had to be.
