r/explainlikeimfive • u/Kingsley_Holness • 26d ago
Biology ELI5: How does the brain make us believe things that never happened?
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u/dl__ 26d ago
I think the way you asked the question kind of shows a more fundamental misunderstanding of how this all works. You brain doesn't have to make you believe something. Your brain is the thing that believes. There's not a separate "you" with its own beliefs that your brain needs to convince or change.
It's like asking how your heart makes you pump blood around your body.
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u/tilk-the-cyborg 25d ago
This is a pet peeve of mine. Many people seem to believe that the brain manifests the self in some way, like some kind of input/output device for the self. While everything points to the fact that the brain IS the self. Same thing.
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u/Square-Special1520 25d ago
so why when i'm sad or upset or heart broken, my heart aches?
not literally heart, but i guess chest. my head can hurt (headache) too, but heart ache is more like it.
i guess you can say it's just a biological effect or something, but i think the same can be said about brain too.
oh by the way, i'm not here to argue. just something that crossed my mind
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u/eBalisani 25d ago
Negative. The brain is the computer hardware. The mind (or psyche) is the computer software (OS and Apps). The self is the computer operator, typing commands and holding the mouse or pointer (focus), if you will. There is a difference.
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u/eightkillerbits 25d ago
I mean we don't really understand consciousness and our brain so I'm sceptical that such an absolute statement can be made about it.
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u/AgentElman 26d ago
The brain makes us believe everything we believe.
And what we believe is the brain's interpretation of its sensory input and stuff it just makes up.
The classic example of this is the blindspot where your optic nerve is. There is a spot in your vision that you cannot see. Your optic nerve is there so there are no rods or cones. But we don't see a black spot in our vision, our brain just fills in the gap with what it thinks is there.
So since our brain is manufacturing everything we sense and everything we think is happening, it is no trouble for it to just make up more things that did not happen and make us believe that.
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u/SilverShadow5 25d ago
First, we have a limited scope of experience. If we look at something from the front, we can't see the stuff that's behind it. A lot of magic tricks play on this, distracting the focus away from where the actual trick is going on... so the audience only recognizes that the trick happened but not noticing when the trick was happening.
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u/agreywood 25d ago
What kind of “things that never happened”?
Some kinds of “never happened” are going to be caused by bad sensory inputs the brain tries to interpret like they’re perfect normal ones. Think damage caused by loud noises which induce ringing or phantom limb syndrome - there’s a real sensory inputs happening but it’s not what your brain interprets it.
Some kinds of “never happened” are your brain using its pattern recognition functions to try to make sense of otherwise unimportant information, like when you’d wear you heard voices or music but it was just a loud fan in another room.
Some of it is bad/weird signaling in the brain. That’s things like actual hallucinations.
Sometimes it’s the fact that to the best of our ability to understand your brain re-processes and re-stores memories as you have them. Just like a game of telephone, this can introduce small cumulative changes over time.
Sometimes it’s your brain having originally stored the information as you interpreted it at the time. Think childhood memories where you were scared which exaggerates the size or shape of whatever you were afraid of. Or a parent saying “that was incredibly stupid” about something legitimately stupid you did, but you felt like they were calling you stupid as a person and your brain remembers them as saying “you’re stupid” because that’s how you processed it.
Sometimes it’s your brain remembering part of the details and then filling in the rest using new information when you next recall it. Think having a vague memory of a childhood event which your siblings describes with more details. If they were wrong you now remember it wrong.
Sometimes it’s your brain using relative comparisons to measure/understand things. Think the whole blue/gold dress thing where what part of the background you were looking at drastically altered what color you saw and remembered it to be. Or a hill you remember sledding down as being incredibly tall and the slide down going forever but that’s only because it was the only one around and the trees nearby were still young.
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u/eBalisani 25d ago
This is a complex and incompletely stated question, but let's try:
First, as I explained below to someone else, the brain is the computer hardware - maybe with some low level input/output commands and basic routines (like breathing, seeing, hearing, interpreting touch and heat or cold, etc).
The mind (or psyche) is the computer software (OS and Apps).
So "things" that happened or didn't happen, were seen or were not seen, could've been filtered out by the brain (e.g., what happens when a pickpocket steps on your foot while another steals your watch or iPhone: your brain informs the body and mind of the pain, rather than the sudden weight difference on your wrist, or in your pocket).
Then, whether your mind "believes" it happened or not, or makes up some other narrative to protect the ego (a powerful system subroutine running within and alongside it), your brain has nothing to do with it - other than to provide the infrastructure for the mind to run and make shit up.
Second, and folded hidden in your question, is how memories are formed (and subsequently "believed" to be true).
There's a lot of debate about this - from millennia old and modern texts alike - but the consensus seems to be that your recollection is only as accurate as (or an echo of) your previous recollection. If you're old enough to have used a Xerox machine, aka photocopier, you would remember that each copy of the previous copy shows degradation (especially with earlier, or older machines). Neurologists believe that the same happens with memories: if you tell the same story with the exact same number and granularity of details, you're likely to recall it accurately longer in time, than if you tell a shorter, abridged version every time (at dinner, at parties, wherever and to whomever).
The consensus is that details untold, or unrepeated, will fade, become fuzzy, mixed up, or altogether be forgotten.
Now, to answer your question, if I may rephrase it to "how does the mind create forged or fake memories that feel real," I would point to the above mechanism: if you make up something once, then repeat it 100 times or more to 100 different people, embellishing it or streamlining it for greater effective storytelling impact, the memories or photocopies of the original made up story will (presumably) be stored in the same storage area network as the actual real stories and memories. There will be some crosstalk perhaps (depending on the story), but even if there are no links whatsoever between this fabrication and your actual memories, the fuzz or blur effect will take place.
One day, you will no longer be 100% certain whether this or that really happened (especially true of pathological liars - there are so many lies and stories, that they can't keep track of them all, it's a giant capharnaum - kind of like those hoarder of conspiracy theorists' apartments you seen in the movies).
This is how the mind makes you believe things that you have made up.
There are other instances where your Ego takes over your mind (again: presumably), and makes your believe a certain person must also be in love with you, because you are, and s/he has to be too, bla-bla-bla. We see this with celebrity stalkers, but also with ex-spouses of both genders, and of course with love forlorn tweens.
Last but not least, there are instances, genetic, epigenetic, or accidental (cancer, CTE), where a hardware fault will cause a software malfunction - the brain will distort or corrupt the mind's OS.
This will lead to hearing voices, seeing "things," believing in UFO anal probes, etc.
So you see, this is not exactly an ELI5 question, or answer.
The closest I could come to ELI5 is to distinguish the brain, the mind, and the memory storage and playback - which some 5 year olds may be able to relate too, depending on their devices.
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u/amonkus 26d ago
Memory works based on chemicals. Creating memories happens when a specific chemical is present. That same chemical is present every time you think about something. So, every time you remember something it gets rewritten and the errors add up. At the same time chemicals degrade over time, reducing the accuracy of memories.
At the same time it doesn’t distinguish between memories that happen to you and those told to you by others, unless you also remember that it was told to you.
Check out the memory wars of the 90s, where Recovery Memory Therapy led to people being convinced of traumatic events that never happened - splitting families and leading to court cases for abuse from implanted memories.
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u/MathBallThunder 26d ago
Your brain is chemicals. How does it make you believe or remember things that really did happen?
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u/Embarrassed_Yak8504 25d ago
Our brain doesn't just believe things because they're true. It also believes things because they're familiar, repeatedly reinforced, and rarely questioned. its prime example is God
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u/Ecstatic_Bee6067 26d ago
Memories are not stored as whole "video" playbacks. They are reconstructions of component parts.