Lisa Feldman Barrett interview with Tom Bilyue

If you haven’t seen Lisa Feldman Barrett’s TED talk, go watch it!

Try to catch her recent podcast interviews. I thoroughly enjoyed her interview with Tom Bilyue. Her research on brain function is intriguing and insightful. What she shares should be required listening/viewing for every person who thinks they know what they know. (Yeah, that’s pretty much everyone).

While the whole interview with Tom is engaging, I thought I’d tease out some quotes worthy of further discussion. Here’s one segment to give you a better sense of how your brain is perceiving things:

“So the sense data that’s it’s receiving from the world is always: ambiguous, noisy, and partial. If we were to stop time right now, your brain would have taken an accounting of what’s going on in the world right now and what’s going on inside your own body. Based on your past experiences it’s gonna make a guess about what’s gonna happen next. A prediction.”

It’s fascinating to know that so much of how we perceive things comes from us guessing what is happening with the information we receive. The brain is trying to predict what things mean based on our past experiences.

“What you see is a combination of what’s out there, and what’s in here (in your own brain).” What’s in here (your brain) is cultural. In one culture, one set of knowledge is put there, in another culture, another set of knowledge is put there. Then that means, there’s not just some cultural overlay, your…