10 Lies Your Brain Tells You Every Day

Right now, there's a hole in your vision — and you've never seen it. Your brain fills it in, fakes the colors at the edges of your sight, back-dates what you see, rewrites your memories, invents reasons for your choices, and even decides where "you" end. In this video we count down the 10 biggest lies your brain tells you — and the scientists who caught it red-handed. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 There's a hole in your vision 0:42 #10 The blind spot 1:35 #9 You go blind 3 times a second 2:31 #8 Your world has almost no color 3:09 #7 You are living in the past 3:59 #6 The gorilla and the door 4:54 #5 Your brain invents your reasons 5:48 #4 Memories that never happened 6:39 #3 Your brain tastes the price tag 7:37 #2 You may decide before you decide 8:19 #1 The biggest lie is you 8:49 Why your brain lies 📚 SOURCES #10 The blind spot Edme Mariotte and the discovery of the blind spot (c. 1660) — #9 Saccades & the "stopped clock" illusion Yarrow, Haggard, Heal, Brown & Rothwell (2001). Illusory perceptions of space and time preserve cross-saccadic perceptual continuity. Nature, 414. #8 Color at the edges of vision Cohen, Botch & Robertson (2020). The limits of color awareness during active, real-world vision. PNAS. #6 Inattentional & change blindness Simons & Chabris (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28. Simons & Levin (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5. #5 Choice blindness & "the interpreter" Johansson, Hall, Sikström & Olsson (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310. Gazzaniga (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain, 123. #4 False memories Loftus & Palmer (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13. Loftus & Pickrell (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725. #3 Wine, color and price Morrot, Brochet & Dubourdieu (2001). The color of odors. Brain and Language, 79. Plassmann, O'Doherty, Shiv & Rangel (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. PNAS, 105. #2 Decisions before awareness Libet, Gleason, Wright & Pearl (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity. Brain, 106. Soon, Brass, Heinze & Haynes (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11. #1 The rubber hand illusion Botvinick & Cohen (1998). Rubber hands "feel" touch that eyes see. Nature, 391. Note: the interpretation of the Libet and Haynes experiments is still debated among neuroscientists — they show the brain prepares simple movements before we report deciding, not that free will doesn't exist. #brain #psychology #neuroscience #science #illusions