Can you trust your brain?

Why your brain can’t be fully trusted

1. It fills in gaps
Your brain constantly guesses what should be there. Optical illusions work because the brain assumes patterns, edges, and meanings—even when they’re wrong.

2. It edits reality
You don’t perceive raw data. Your brain filters what it thinks is important and discards the rest. Attention, expectations, and emotions decide what you “see” and “hear.”

3. Memory is reconstruction, not recording
Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it—mixing facts, emotions, and later information. That’s why eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

4. Bias is built-in
Cognitive biases (confirmation bias, negativity bias, hindsight bias) help with quick decisions but distort truth. You often believe what fits your story, not what’s accurate.

5. Emotions hijack interpretation
Fear, stress, love, or anger can radically change how the same event feels and is understood. The event doesn’t change—your interpretation does.

Why you can trust it sometimes

Your brain is excellent at:

• Pattern recognition
• Survival decisions
• Social cues
• Making fast judgments when time matters

If it weren’t, humans wouldn’t have survived.

So what’s the real answer?

You can’t blindly trust your brain—but you can work with it.

How to compensate:

• Question first impressions
• Seek multiple perspectives
• Slow down important decisions
• Separate facts from feelings
• Verify memories and assumptions

A useful way to think about it

Your brain is not a truth machine.
It’s a storytelling machine optimized for survival.

Truth requires effort.

Conclusion:
You can’t fully trust your brain to show reality exactly as it is. It interprets, filters, and reshapes the world to help you survive—not to deliver perfect truth. But when you question it, slow it down, and verify its assumptions, your brain becomes a powerful tool rather than a misleading one. Reality is clearer when awareness guides perception.