What If Reality Isn’t What We Think It Is?
According to what science now tells us about the mind, reality is not the absolute, fixed, tangible thing we’ve long assumed it to be. And we don’t all see reality in the same way. That might be a difficult idea to wrap our heads around—but it’s one that’s quietly reshaping how we understand ourselves and the world.
Imagine stepping into a virtual reality game. Your sensory channels are picking up digital signals that make you believe you’re seeing actual fish swimming around you. Those signals are also causing you to feel the ocean current and to sense yourself floating. You might even reach out to touch the fish—only for them to glide past, just beyond your grasp. It feels real. Very real. Until you take off the headset.
The fish were never there. They were projections—stitched together by code. If you didn’t know you were in a virtual reality environment, you might mistake the fish for real.
Now imagine that the virtual reality we’re experiencing is the real reality we live within, but that the signals being projected emanate from the vast tapestry of energies coursing around us at all times.
What if the world we see is a kind of mental rendering of these signals—signals such as light waves, sound waves, seismic waves, vibrations, electromagnetic waves, thermal energy, and many more.
Just like in a virtual reality environment, we don’t perceive these various types of energy frequencies directly. Instead, our brains turn them into patterns which get labeled as fish, water, wave, and so on.
Cognitive neuroscience, perceptual psychology, and related sciences, now show that’s exactly what happens.
This means we’re not seeing reality directly. We’re seeing the assembled projections that our mind makes in trying to render these otherwise overwhelming and chaotic signals into something we can make use of at the level of reality in which we exist.
So, our brains decide for us what’s real and what’s not real, based on the patterns it develops over time.
But what happens when our brains are presented with new combinations of sensory input (or, in other words, new data) for which it has not yet created a pattern for categorizing and making sense of? Could our brains create patterns of interpretation that might do more harm than good?
Absolutely. And the consequences of those mis-renderings can ripple through our beliefs, behaviors, and shared realities.
What Happens When the Brain Faces Novel Situations
Example upon example throughout history demonstrate what can happen when the brain is faced with novelty and misinterprets what the senses are telling it. Here are some well-known examples which have had drastic consequences.
- Witch Trials: In 17th-century Europe and colonial America, certain behaviors—like seizures, emotional outbursts, or defiance—were seen as signs of witchcraft. More than 80,000 people are said to have been executed due to the hysteria witchery caused in the 1500s and 1600s. Today, those same behaviors might be understood as symptoms of neurological or psychological conditions. Notably, the signals coming into our brains didn’t change. We still saw bizarre behaviors. It’s that our interpretation of those behaviors changed.
- The Copernican Shift: For centuries, people believed the sun circled the Earth. Then, in 1543, Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun. It took more than 100 years for the idea to become the consensus view within scientific circles, and another 100 to be fully absorbed into the fabric of society. It’s not that the Earth moved. It’s that our understanding of gravitational forces did.
- Germ Theory: Similarly, for centuries disease was blamed on “bad air” or miasma and often attributed to having lived a sinful life. And then, 200 years after the invention of the microscope, Louis Pasteur finally demonstrated that microorganisms caused fermentation and spoilage. Medical proof didn’t come until the 1870s-1880s when Robert Koch identified specific bacteria as the causes of diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. And, as seems to be the norm when new inventions are discovered, it took another almost 100 years for the idea to become fully institutionalized across the cultures of the world. The symptoms were the same—but the cause, and thus the reality, was reinterpreted.
So, were witches real? Did the sun revolve around the earth? Was bad air the cause of disease? Most certainly, for the people at the time. Why? Because the physical sense mechanisms which are the gatekeepers to our brains, have limitations.
It was only after scientific proofs could be provided that the tides began to change. And yet, due to the well-entrenched beliefs, it took generations before society would accept ideas which today we take for granted.
And yet, these shifts didn’t change the underlying signals coming from the environment—the energies that triggered behaviors like seizures or emotional outbursts. Those signals remained the same. What changed was how our brains interpreted them. With new discoveries, new information, the gradual letting up of societal pressures, the same sensory inputs were reclassified, recontextualized, and re-understood.
Reality itself hadn’t changed. What changed was our interpretation of it. We thought we were seeing truth—but we were seeing a version shaped by limited understanding. It wasn’t reality itself. It was our best guess at the time.
And if our interpretations have changed so drastically before, what else might we be misreading today?
The Sliver We Call Reality
So, what’s really going on?
We exist within the midst of an environment full of energies, each with their own wave lengths, frequencies, spectrums, etc. We aren’t physically equipped to detect most of these energies or their ranges, but they’re present under the surface of our sensory apparatus, nonetheless.
Our senses act as filtering devices to keep most of these signals out of our brains, sending forward only those signals which they are physically able to detect.
Our brains then go to work on sorting and making sense out of the data that the senses let in, according to what’s familiar and seemingly useful, within the framework of the stories it has already spun.
The interpretation that our minds create then becomes our reality. We believe whole-heartedly in the idea that what our minds are interpreting is in fact reality.
It’s clear, however, that reality is far bigger than what our senses can detect, and what our minds can organize and make sense of.
Like the example of fish in the virtual game, we’re swimming in an ocean of energies. We can only see, touch, and feel a sliver of those energies.
The rest? For most people, they don’t exist. But in truth, the reality we can’t detect may be every bit as important as the reality we can. And if we’ve misread reality before, what might we be misreading now?
The Reality We Cannot See
It’s clear we’re able to perceive, sort, and make sense of only a small sliver of the reality that swirls around and through us. Our perceptual apparatus can detect only a narrow bandwidth of what’s out there, and our brain, as magnificent as it is, operates only within the framework of what it already knows.
So, what lies beyond the sliver of reality we’re able to detect and make sense of? What exists in the vastness we cannot detect, cannot name, cannot yet imagine?
Science tells us that the universe is teeming with energies and phenomena that fall outside our perceptual reach. We see only a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum—just enough to navigate the visible world. We hear only a narrow range of frequencies. We feel only the most immediate vibrations. And even these are filtered, edited, and interpreted by our brains before they become part of our conscious experience.
The Hidden Layers of Reality
Consider just a few of the realities revealed through the aid of scientific instrumentation that remain invisible to our everyday experience:
- Infrared and Ultraviolet Light: Bees see ultraviolet patterns on flowers that guide them to nectar. Snakes detect infrared heat signatures from prey. These realities exist—but not for us.
- Magnetic Fields and Gravitational Waves: We move through invisible fields that shape everything from planetary motion to bird migration. We don’t sense them directly, but they are foundational to the structure of the cosmos.
- Quantum Entanglement and Nonlocality: At the subatomic level, particles can influence each other instantaneously across vast distances. This defies our intuitive sense of space and time—and yet it’s demonstrably real.
- Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Together, they make up roughly 95% of the universe. We don’t know what they are. We can’t see them. But their gravitational effects are undeniable.
These are all aspects of reality that lie beyond our everyday experience, aspects we could never even have conceived of before the advent of modern science. They shape our world in ways that our brains struggle to comprehend. And as with past “mysteries,” like the bizarre behaviors once attributed to witches, it may take generations to absorb how these hidden layers of reality shape our everyday lives.
The Mind’s Rendering Engine
And even within the sliver we do perceive, our minds are constantly editing. We fill in blind spots. We smooth over inconsistencies. We ignore what doesn’t meet our expectations. This is not a flaw. It’s a feature. It allows us to function. But it also means that what we call “reality” is a curated experience, not a direct encounter.
So, what happens when we begin to suspect that our curated experience is missing something vital? That our rendering engine is skipping over truths that could reshape how we live, how we relate, how we understand ourselves?
We begin to look differently. To listen more carefully. To question what we’ve assumed. And in doing so, we begin to expand the sliver.
Perhaps the first step in the process is in realizing how little we’ve seen all along.
