What Do We Really Know-2? (Text Essay)

All Of Us Speak With Conviction, But What Do We Really Know?

I once published an essay about how we claim to know what we think we know.  While my first article was a cautionary tale filled with discussions of first, second, and third person sourcing and I made a case for how much of what we think we know and believe is actually taken from sources that we cannot possibly verify, some tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years old. I questioned how we develop opinions so liberally when so many of our facts and information about the world are also prominently drawn from the opinions, observations, or accounts of others and not from first-person experience and knowledge..

Then I watched a television series called "Your Bleeped-Up Brain" and came away even less sure that we really "know" much of anything! I enjoyed the series noted above and have since seen other corroborating experiments and demonstrations of how easily the human brain confuses itself, makes up information to clear up that confusion, and totally rewrites both memories and immediate events as well. In many ways this article presents evidence that our inability to recognize and remember detail clouds our every judgement about the present and the past, causing a lack of honest clarity regarding every moment and aspect of our lives.  It makes me less sure of myself, and everyone around me in relation to our abilities to truthfully and clearly determine the events that make up our present reality and the collective memory of our past. Our brains simply force us to be much more careless of the truth, and the facts, than we would like.

The following material is adapted, quoted, and taken almost completely from the original materials presented in that series. My efforts are responsible only for the re-organization of the material here.  Consider it well-cited and copyrighted, where applicable. Also I recommend you view the series to see all the experiments that verify their findings and conclusions.

This essay intends to draw on the conclusions scientifically reached in that Series to bring into question the veracity and reliability of first person accounts; the primary and fundamentally unchallenged sourcing of much of our history and knowledge of the world around us, its events, and realities.

We'll start with deliberately contrived Deceptions and Cons and then move on to our more natural perceptions.

"You can be duped into just about anything."

The brain operates at a level of just 15 Watts of power yet it collects enormous amounts of information in its attempt to construct for us a perception of the reality of the Universe as we experience it. As generations of magicians have known, deliberately changing the focus of what the brain is concentrating on at the moment can make us vulnerable to deceptions. The inability of our brains to always accurately perceive immediate change, even large environmental changes, often occurs due to distractions in our attentiveness, a virtual change-blindness. If our attention is distracted, diverted, or intentionally re-directed to other events or interactions, human beings can miss substantial changes in our immediate environment--seemingly right before our eyes. Magic. Change-blindness affects us all everyday. Even our meager attempts to focus specifically on one event or interaction can cause us to miss more important happenings right in front of us. Just because our brain takes in the sensory input happening doesn't mean it chooses to record the details and display it for us consciously as a part of our experience. In other words, just because we see something doesn't mean we pay attention to it, and neither does it mean that all the most important details are "chosen" by our brains for us to determine, or review, what we have truly experienced.  ''Seeing" may not warrant "Believing".  Our brains are flawed. They take "shortcuts" all the time to reach what they decide to perceive as reality.  This is because the brain has so much to do it simply can't take the time, or expend the energy, to examine every detail in its sensory, or intellectual, environment. Human brains generally operate at a "just good enough" capacity to interpret what is going on around us. Our tendency is to believe, incorrectly, that what our brains tell us we are experiencing is truthful. Often we depend solely on our vision--ignoring other sensory details or intellectual considerations--missing completely the actual occurrences or activities before us. This has been amply proven by capable magicians and confident con-men throughout time.  But more often than not, we do it to ourselves.

We'll continue with Illusion. Through simple experiments we can undeniably demonstrate that our brains, and more importantly--the relationship between our vision and our brain--have shown themselves to be easily subject to buying into the simplest of illusions.  Our assumptions are so easily manipulated because our brains want the world to maintain a seamlessness of reality that ignores any unexpected changes likely to occur at any moment. This causes us to overlook or unintentionally miss extremely important details crucial to a true understanding of facts or situations.

Very few people take the time to critically review what they have witnessed, believing that the brain automatically and correctly perceives events as they happen. The reality is that many of the more minuscule details of what we think we see have not really occurred. They have simply been created and then filled-in by our brains. Why? In essence, the brain is lazy.  It prefers to develop an outline of what it thinks it perceives and then fills in the rest in a way that makes the details match the outline, trusting that it has grasped the essence of what is going on.  In actuality we are inclined to make quick, almost instantaneous assumptions that often obscure reality with dramatic effect. The limitation of the subconscious brain to grasp detail is huge as it relates to the amount of information our senses can absorb as compared to the amount the brain can effectively process. It can't keep up with influx of information so it selectively manipulates, or ignores, the billions of bits of data flooding our streams of subconscious perception and prepares a much smaller, and more rational sampling for our conscious mind. So we are only consciously seeing and sensing small snippets of reality at any given moment.

"The world that you perceive in your consciousness is not the world that's out there. What you perceive is a pre-digested version of the world created by your subconscious."

Superstition is the next way in which our brains trick us into believing we have a grasp on reality. Our brains are really very conservative thought-machines. They simply cannot accept sensory input that seems "impossible", or even radically implausible, to our psyche. At an early age the brain constructs its own version of reality to which every subsequent version is compared.  If what is being experienced or viewed does not fit that pre-conceived construction, the brain will simply choose to ignore, rewrite, or reinterpret the input to cause it to "fit" its version of reality. If it cannot interpret the data within its own reality it will seek its own explanation, even if has to "fill in the blanks" to get there. Often the brain will look for patterns that don't exist.

50% of Americans admit to being superstitious. Much of this phenomena resides in the subconscious which automatically processes all stimuli before allowing it to "go public" and become consciously perceived.  So the subconscious mind is kind of like a sensory "thought police". But the subconscious is a poor detective. It will often deduce a solution to confusing, inappropriate, or contradictory data that lacks important information by incorrectly compensating with data of its own construction, even if the conclusions stubbornly refute the truth borne out by determined facts. (Sound like anyone we know?)

In the human eye, a blind spot is a place where the optic nerve actually prevents information from entering the retina.  How is this handled by the brain?  Actually the brain cannot allow this situation to occur and it will automatically manufacture (fabricate), and fill in the missing data. When no clear cause or effect exists, the brain demands that one be created and accepted. The fact that our minds will actually create previously non-existent data leads us often to erroneous cause and effect conclusions.  This brain-driven slight-of-hand, caused by frequent lapses in credible attentiveness, is so normal in our day-to-day lives that we are often unable to "see" what is really happening before our eyes. We are so used to simply observing appearances that our brains find "logical conclusions" even when they don't exist! Superstition is merely the brain's attempt to solve problems it does not have the data to understand.

One example is pareidolia, the human predilection to see human faces everywhere and in everything--like the 2008 cheese-toast Virgin Mary that sold for $28,000.00 on Ebay. We are hardwired to see faces: on Mars, on the moon, in a piece of pizza, in the clouds, on rocks, in ghostly photos, etc. If the brain is intrigued enough by the subject, it will respond--even if it must fabricate the response. In science, it is recognized that if one "begins with a "hindsight bias", one is likely to arrive at a "predicative event", which will bring order to a chaotic environment."

The brain is constantly attempting to "protect us" from chaos.  Superstition is one of its weapons. The brain will almost always find a way to explain what we see or experience.  If it cannot find a way to do that human beings are subject to extreme duress or even psychotic breaks.  The results of Rorschach Tests (a showing of random images to human subjects) demonstrate how the brain pre-disposes us to make meaning of randomness and draw conclusions from those meanings. It is no wonder then that superstitions have such a prominent place among humanity and that so many "beliefs" are held that have no basis in fact nor reality.

"Personal memories are not what they seem. And history is not what it seems. Effectively, they are all just stories."

            Human beings accept that Memory is one of our greatest and most cherished capacities. Yet it is one of our most fallible, fractured, and unreliable characteristics. We base our criminal justice system on it and consider "the witnessing" and "remembrance" of that witnessing to be one of our most reliable traits. We couldn't be more wrong.

What would you say if you were told, by the most reliable of scientific sources, that you may have memories of events that never happened? That is, in fact, what science has demonstrated.  You can't remember what you don't notice. In among the vast quantities of sensory detail we are inundated with at every moment of every day, only a small fraction is chosen by our subconscious to make it into our consciousness, and of that, only a small amount of select detail is spotlighted to make it into our memory. This information is usually general rather than specific and may be missing crucial details for understanding or interpretation. If the necessary detail for understanding was missed or corrupted beyond recognition the brain will simply fabricate or overwrite the corresponding details so the event may reasonable interpreted and remembered. Unless there is a substitute or secondary record to consult for accuracy the subconscious brain will recreate the memory with the new information and we will never be aware that this has happened.  The way we remember things, including these discrepancies, ultimately contributes to the way we understand our world, our reality, our experiences and our memories which directly relates to the beliefs we hold, the assurances we accept, and the actions we take. In the end, it affects how we remember our lives, whether what we think we remember ever happened or not.

Our brain takes in approximately 34 gigabytes of data every day.  We are consciously aware of only about 2000 bits of information per second as our brains collect about 400,000,000,000. We only notice half a tenth of a millionth of one percent of what we experience every second. That's a lot. We actually miss much much more than we pick up.  Even when all the data is in, and none has "gone missing", our memory can fail to record details in a way that they are noticed, or they can be obscured or misinterpreted. Due to the vast amount of information coming in we are forced into a selective retention of only a small portion of the detail available to our subconscious memory.  The result is that we are consistently "missing" crucial details that would add to the accuracy of our conscious memories, leaving us with a memory partly fact, and partly fiction.

We all experience lapses in memory where information we process and use regularly suddenly seems to vanish from our mind. This inexplicable loss of trusted memory may last only a few seconds or longer--not only representing a startling inconvenience but hinting at the reality of the fragility of our consciousness. Now reach down into those depths again and struggle to describe even one side of a dollar bill, an item most adult Americans have looked at countless times. How much detail do you actually remember? In your mind you can see the hazy outline of the bill.  Your mind is filling in the blanks with generally remembered images and backgrounds, but as to the specifics--you may be having difficulty. Yet if we asked the persons who designed the bill, they could probably answer in minute detail.  This is the crux of memory. The more familiar we are with the subject, the more detail we observe, the more we accurately access the immediate memory and re-examine those details--the more accurate and factual the "remembering".  But life goes by fast.  Most of us don't have time to "replay" every event to recall the details.  Few of us are trained to recognize details at all.  Part of a detective's training is to notice, and recall, detail. Sherlock Holmes made the process famous. But most human beings are notoriously bad at remembering detail, thus their memories are similarly faulty.  And as the years progress, memory becomes less and less reliable.

Back to the dollar bill.  Sometimes the more we use the information, the less likely we are to remember the specific detail surrounding it.  Memory is not kept in a filing cabinet. The truth of a memory lies with how our brain stores the details.  If a suggestion to reorganize the details is accepted, false memories can be created. One of the many experiments shown in the "Bleeped-Up Brain" Series

was to doctor a photo of the Tienanmen Square demonstration in China to show that a crowd was present. Witnesses who were familiar with the event were asked if they remembered the crowd and they all "remembered" the crowd as an important part of the event. When shown the true photos with no crowd present they were shocked and upset to discover they had "mis-remembered" the event. Our brains and memories are ever open to interpretation and manipulation, internally and externally. Should enough confusing or contradictory data be reinserted into the process, memories can be "mis-remembered", even contaminated and manipulated, so that the details and subsequent memories are distorted in regard to their true facts. Today, scientists are fully capable of "creating" false memories in the human brain. But actually, we humans do it all the time, naturally.

"I know what I saw" is the basis of the witness component of our criminal justice system.  Police are thought to be trained in observation of detail but even they are subject to this process of memory selection.  73% of test subjects interviewed remembered the first plane striking the World Trade Center Towers on 9-11. In actuality, there was no visual footage ever shot or aired of the first plane crashing into the Tower. It was a false memory.

Short term memory in the average human can only retain 4 to 7 details at a time.  Exceed that number and facts begin to go south in a hurry. A group of test subjects were shown 15 words relating to sleep and then were asked to remember if the word sleep was actually included among the words. 100% of them "remembered", with certainty, that the word sleep had been included. It was not.

Simply being sure of a memory does not in any way guarantee a memory is, in fact, correct.  It has long been understood by propagandists that a simple verbal repetition of a message reinforces the accepted truthfulness of the message, even when the message is entirely false. Our brains have the same unfortunate tendencies.  Once our brain believes it has an adequate understanding or perception of an event, an idea, an image, or a concept, it will immediately discontinue any search for qualifying or corroborating details or sensory data to confirm its opinion. We are, in the end, only interested in the simplest "big-picture" we can find that makes the most immediate sense to our subconscious and conscious mind.  Our brains have no interest once we have decided on what is important and necessary. Beyond that, unless forced to reassess, we make no further attempts at verification.

"When you become aware of how the brain actually works; its amazing ability to construct our perception of the Universe--it changes everything."

"Your brain lies to you constantly."

Scientific tests, experiments, and demonstrations have unequivocally determined that our brains  deceive, trick, lie, dupe (whatever word you want to choose), human beings regarding what we see, feel, sense, experience, know, remember, and believe every day of our lives.  Our senses and memory fool us constantly. Its not any evil plot, just the hardwired mechanics of a miraculous organ, capable of much more than we can utilize or control. With amodal perception, our brains just fill in the details. Our truth is more about context and levels of perception than factual content.

We generally accept the visual evidence of our senses without a competent verification from our intellect. Compelling visual signs and a predisposition to accept what we hear are often accepted by our brains as fact.  Once the brain makes a determination of which details it will rely on to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from fallacy, reality from hallucination, it is extremely difficult to convince the brain to reassess or accept an alternate conclusion.  We constantly see things that aren't there and miss seeing things that are. Imagined patterns, shapes, and lines warp our perceptions and conclusions while creating illusions we come to accept. We are prone to determining trustworthiness in our fellows without evidence, basing our opinions and beliefs on appearances, attractiveness, and chemistry.  Our brains influence our every determination of fact, truth, and evidence of reality.  Knowing this, we can be more attentive to detail, and train ourselves to be less trusting of our own hubris. To make true sense of our world and reality, if it exists at all, we need to be more careful with what we believe, and more open to the possibility that we can be wrong. Who knows what magic is inherent in the world?

Credit all quotes, original material and information to the authors, publishers, and producers at

History Channel 2 HD   "Your Bleeped Up Brain"

From the airings: 5-18-13, 5-27-13, 8-10-13, 8-17-13, 10-10-13