If your perception isn't objective...How do you know what's actually real?
In Part 2 of this Decoded series, Elisabeth McKay explores one of the most unsettling questions in neuroscience and psychology: How does self-deception form, and why does it feel indistinguishable from truth?
Building on the foundation established in Part 1, this episode examines how attention, memory, emotional salience, prediction, and past experiences shape the reality you experience every day. Elisabeth explains why two people can experience the same event and leave with completely different conclusions—and why certainty itself may be one of the brain's greatest illusions.
In this episode:
Why attention determines your experience of reality
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) explained
How the salience network decides what matters
Why memory is reconstructed—not replayed
Narrative formation and emotional meaning
Why relationships break down over interpretation
Trauma, prediction, and self-fulfilling prophecies
The psychology of self-deception
Reality vertigo and cognitive dissonance
Plato's Cave and modern neuroscience
Consciousness and the "hard problem"
Simulation theory through a neuroscience lens
Why objective truth still matters
This conversation connects neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and behavioral science to challenge one of our deepest assumptions—that the way we experience reality is reality itself.
If Part 1 explained how your brain constructs reality, Part 2 explains why that construction becomes so convincing that it feels like truth.
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