Nir Eyal

Most of the decisions we make in day-to-day life, they're not based on facts.

They're based on beliefs.

And so the startling revelation here is that your brain is lying to you.

It's constantly deceiving you because the brain doesn't see reality as it is.

It sees reality as it predicts it will be.

So none of us are actually seeing reality as it is.

What does that mean?

It means that none of us are actually seeing reality as it is.

That it's impossible.

We can't.

Our brains can't handle it.

That we know that the brain is processing about 11 million bits of information per second.

11 million bits, to put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice.

It's a tremendous amount of information.

So the brain can't deal with that much information.

It can only consciously be aware of about 50 bits of information.

So that means that you are seeing reality through this tiny pinhole of attention.

So you're only seeing 0.000045% of what you think is reality.

And so what the brain is doing is essentially filtering reality based on its beliefs, not based on what reality is, but how we expect it to be.

It's called predictive processing.