Expanding your worldview starts with understanding your brain. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman explains.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast, explores how our brains shape the reality we experience and why we often accept our perceptions as the only truth. From a young age, we develop our understanding of the world based on limited experiences and biases, which can lead us to form narrow views about what's true.
**🧠 “Your Reality Is Just One Version” — Why Expanding Your Mind Could Save Humanity**
What if everything you believe to be *true* is just one narrow version of reality? According to neuroscientist David Eagleman, that’s exactly what’s happening — and it’s shaping not just your thoughts, but society itself.
We’re **born into a tiny slice of the world**, gathering experiences from a limited time, place, and culture. Our brains build internal models based on that — models we confuse with *universal truth*. But here’s the kicker: **no two brains experience the world the same way**, thanks to differences in genetics and life experiences.
This isn’t just philosophical. It’s biological.
🔬 Eagleman’s work in *perceptual genomics* explores how tiny differences in our genes change how we *see* reality. You might visualize a crawling ant in vivid detail; someone else sees only the concept. Both are “true” — just different.
But this brain wiring also makes us tribal.
We divide into **ingroups** and **outgroups**, trusting the familiar and fearing the unfamiliar — an ancient survival instinct. And it affects empathy, **literally**. Eagleman’s experiment showed people’s brains *cared less* when an outgroup member was hurt versus an ingroup one. The same action (like a needle stab) triggered weaker pain responses if the person wasn’t “one of us.”
This leads to dehumanization in conflicts, where we stop seeing the “other side” as fully human. The brain’s empathy centers don’t even light up. It’s how wars, hate, and division thrive.
But there’s hope. Eagleman lays out **3 strategies** to overcome this:
1. **Recognize and blind your biases** – Like orchestras using blind auditions, remove visual cues that trigger unconscious judgments.
2. **Learn the tactics of dehumanization** – Spot things like “moral pollution,” where groups are smeared to make them seem disgusting. Awareness is your shield.
3. **Complexify your identity** – Form bonds over shared interests *before* you discover differences. That connection builds understanding and curiosity instead of rejection.
🤝 The more we **entangle our identities** — across sports, hobbies, stories, struggles — the more we see each other as *people*, not strangers. That’s the key to bridging the gap between 8 billion different inner worlds.
**✨ Big idea:** You don’t live in *the* reality. You live in *a* reality. And the more you understand that, the more human the world becomes.
About David Eagleman:
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national non-profit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw
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