Our day-to-day experiences are a carefully controlled hallucination. To us it feels as if we see stuff and we hear stuff and then we react to it. But under the hood, that is not the way your brain works. Your brain is constantly making predictions. It's constantly reassembling past experiences to predict what's going to happen next.
If you managed to stay awake during Bio 101, then you probably think you have a basic understanding of how your brain works. Not so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. In this cerebral yet highly entertaining conversation with Next Big Idea Club curator Daniel Pink, Lisa says our brains are made for budgeting, not thinking. She debunks the myth of the lizard brain. And she makes the far-out claim that everything you see and hear, including this podcast, is a hallucination.