Your Brain Deletes Most Of Reality

Do we really experience reality... or only a carefully edited version of it?

In this excerpt from my book, The Art of Joyous Expansion, we explore how the brain translates raw sensory information into the world we experience and why perception is far more active than it appears.

Featuring the remarkable Blakemore and Cooper kitten experiment, this chapter reveals how early experience shapes what we notice, what we overlook, and why changing our perception begins with understanding the filters through which we see the world.

The Art of Joyous Expansion is a neuroscience-based guide to conscious identity transformation and creating the life you choose.

Transcript

What if I told you that your brain is deleting most of reality before you ever become aware of it? Today's excerpt explores one of the most fascinating discoveries in neuroscience and the famous experiment with kittens that changed how we understand perception. This is an excerpt from The Art of Joyous Expansion. Vibration versus perception. The word feels solid but isn't. At the end of the previous chapter we arrived at a relevant realization. Your explorer suit does not show you everything that exists. It is carefully selecting, Organizing and presenting a version of reality that matches the menu you have given. We are going to step behind the scenes now. You begin your journey into the control room of your explorer's suit, The place where perception is not just experienced, But constructed. Because once you understand how your world is built, Something shifts. What once felt fixed becomes adjustable, And what once felt external becomes responsive. To feel this shift more directly, Step into a simple moment. You are standing on a beach at sunset. You see a vibrant sky of orange and purple. You hear the rhythmic crash of the waves. And you feel the warmth of the fading sun on your skin. It feels real, Immediate and deniably out there. But here is the first grade shift. Outside of your explorer suit, There is no color. There is no sound. There is no warmth as you experience it. The physical world, The shore, Is not made of sights and sounds. It is a field of pure vibration. Everything around you, From the chair you are sitting on to the stars in the sky is made of energy moving at different frequencies. Silent, Colorless, Neutral. What you experience as reality is not what is there, It is what your suit does with what is there. Your eye provides a fascinating example of this process. Most people imagine the eye as a window. You open it and you see the world. However, The eye is not a window, But a biological transducer, A system that converts one form of energy into another. Much like a microphone transforms sound into electrical signals, Your eye does something similar, But even more extraordinary. Here's what actually happens. First, Raw data. The Sun emits light. Not color, As you see, But electromagnetic waves, A very small portion of this spectrum, Between roughly 400 and 700 nanometers is what we call visible light. Second, Contact. These waves bounce off objects and enter your eye. Third, Translation. At the back of your eye, On the retina, Millions of specialized cells called photoreceptors, Rods and cones, Respond to these waves. Yet they don't see sunsets or beauty, They simply immediately convert the incoming signals into electrical impulses. And force transmission. These impulses travel through the optic nerve into the brain. And here is the part that changes everything. Your brain has never seen light. It exists in complete darkness, Receiving only a series of binary codes, Electrical impulses. It then looks at those codes, Compares them to your past memories and expectations and says, Aha, This pattern of electricity means orange sunset. You are not seeing reality, You are seeing your brain's interpretation of it. The color orange is not out there in the sky. It is created within you as part of a beautifully designed interface that allows you to navigate the world efficiently. In the same way, Sound is your brain's interpretation of air vibrations. Warmth is your interpretation of molecular activity. Solid objects are mostly empty space, Perceived as structure. Your reality is not a direct experience of the world. It is a rendered experience. As you discovered in Chapter 1, Your Explorer Suite constantly receives an overwhelming stream of raw data. Scientists estimate that your sensory systems send about 11 million bits of information every second, While conscious awareness can process only around 40-150. The rest is filtered away before it ever becomes your experience. What the kittens taught us. Naturally, The next question is, If your system is capable of perceiving more, More opportunity, More connection, More possibility, What determines what actually makes it into your experience? A famous, And somewhat startling, Experiment from the 1970s conducted by researchers Colin Blakemore and Graham Cooper offers a compelling answer. Their work with newborn kittens changed how we understand the brain's relationship with reality forever. The researchers worked with newborn guitars to explore how perception is formed. The kittens were raised in complete darkness. However, For a few hours each day, They were placed into a very specific environment. A tall cylinder that was completely covered in black and white stripes. Some kittens were placed in cylinders with only vertical stripes, Others were placed in cylinders with only horizontal stripes. To ensure nothing else entered their perception, They wore colors that prevented them from seeing their own bodies. For the first month of their lives, Their visual world was reduced to a single pattern. Then they were brought into a normal environment. And here the illusion breaks open. The kittens raised among vertical stripes could move effortlessly around vertical objects, Like the legs of a chair. But when they encountered a horizontal surface, Like the edge of a table or a step, They behaved as if it didn't exist. They would walk straight off a ledge or bump into a horizontal bar. Conversely, The kittens raised in the horizontal world could leap onto a sofa with ease, But they would walk straight into the legs of a table as if the room were empty. The part that matters most. Their eyes were working perfectly. The eyes were capturing the light from the chair legs and the table edges. The electrical signals were being sent to the brain, But their brains did not recognize what they had never learned to see. Their visual cortex had never been programmed to recognize that specific orientation of vibration, So the information was not processed. It was removed. To the vertical kitten, A horizontal table leg wasn't blurred, It wasn't difficult to perceive. It simply did not exist for them. The relevance to our own lives becomes clear very quickly. Like those kittens, Each of us is raised within a kind of perceptual cylinder, Made up of specific beliefs, Cultural narratives and family patterns. These patterns train your system to notice certain aspects of reality while overlooking others. A childhood shaped by scarcity teaches your brain to see the vertical stripes of life. One shaped by unworthiness teaches it to register even subtle confirmations of that pattern. Just like the kittens, You might be walking through a world filled with horizontal stripes of opportunity, Love and abundance. Your eyes can see them, The vibrations are reaching your suit. However, Because those stripes are not part of your program, Your brain is deleting them before they ever reach your conscious awareness. By the time you see the word, The image has already passed through thousands of tiny neural judgments. It has been interpreted, Simplified and organized into something that feels coherent and familiar. You are not missing out on a better life because it is absent. You are missing it because your brain has learned to treat it as irrelevant based on the conditioning it received in the past. But unlike the kittens, You have a choice. You are a conscious leader. You can recognize that your current blind spots are simply the results of outdated filtering. And you can change that filter.