Monday, August 17th 2026
On a rainy afternoon in Dublin in 2017, I was running late for a movie.
I was going to see Logan, the final chapter in Marvel’s Wolverine saga, and I arrived at the theater just as the movie was about to start. It was billed as the story of a reluctant hero with nothing left to believe in. Vanity Fair described it as a powerful, violent blow — raw and real.
What would it look like if everything was taken away and all you were left with was the pain of the present? This piqued my curiosity.
I ran to the electronic kiosk to get a last minute ticket. I grabbed one of the few seats left, near the aisle, and ran into the auditorium.
Inside, 150 people sat in the dark watching the Star Wars trailer. My seat was in the aisle on the other side. I didn’t want to run over people, so I thought I’d run under the screen at the front of the hall and up the stairs in the other wing. Quickly. Invisible. Simple. I adjusted my hat, bent to keep my head down, and ran down the screen.
But there was no corridor on the other side. Just a concrete wall — and I crashed right into it.
The crash knocked me to the ground. To make matters worse, at the exact moment of impact, the Smurfs trailer burst onto the screen. A bright blue mushroom house appeared on the screen, putting me under projectors in front of the entire audience.
The hall erupted in long waves of laughter. I picked up the fallen hat and fixed it, as if that mattered. Dazed and with a sore shin (and maybe not just a shin), I dragged myself back to the doors I’d come in from.
I like to think of myself as a relatively smart person. How did I crash right into a huge concrete wall?
The answer lies in neuroscience. Most of us think that the senses collect data, send it to the brain, and then we react. But an extensive body of research suggests that’s not how things work.
Your brain is an incorrigible gambler that bets on reality. He does not expect information. He guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t win, you hit walls.
It all starts with a prediction — a “top-down” expectation of what the brain thinks it’s going to see. Then, the sensory input coming in “from the bottom up” either confirms this prediction, or updates it when things don’t match. This is known as predictive processing theory.
In 1999, Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard built a computer model that worked just like the brain. They found that higher-order areas of the brain first made predictions about what they expected to see and sent them down the hierarchy. Only when something didn’t match the prediction — what they called a “prediction error” — did the lower levels sound the alarm and send the information back up the hierarchy.
When the brain guesses correctly, there’s no need to notice anything. When you guess wrong — like when you mistake a wall for a corridor — the whole system turns on. It’s not that I didn’t see the wall with my own eyes. It’s that my brain never expected it to be there.
This happens to people all the time when they’re trying to solve problems, when they’re having conversations, and when they’re making decisions. The inner propagandist — the double agent inside us — runs the whole show.
Truth is any prediction that fails to be proven wrong.
The brain faces a world full of ambiguous data and messages. He makes the best possible predictions in moments of uncertainty. We, of course, do not realize that we are guessing. The brain fills in the blanks by using past experiences and context to determine what should be there.
This is the first thing you can do to understand this word, but the words are dirty. Oh, and I love your smile.
I could write the whole book like this and you would understand. But it would be painful to read and, for sure, after that you would wish me dead.
But the essence remains: You don’t see first and then believe. You believe first and then you see. In most cases, this works wonderfully. But every now and then a glitch happens.
Have you ever waved to someone who wasn’t there? Maybe you were walking down the street and saw a friend. Smile. Maybe even raise your hand. And then you realized… it wasn’t him.
This is an example of what is experienced as a positive hallucination — a moment when your brain sees something that isn’t there because it expects it to be there. When you add something to the scene around you.
The brain faces a world full of data and ambiguous messages. He makes the best possible predictions in moments of uncertainty.
There are also negative hallucinations — when you don’t see what’s there. When your brain has erased the things in front of you.
“They’re not on the table. Why don’t you just tell me where you put them… never mind, I found them.”
Our internal propagandists work 24 hours a day, filling in gaps, erasing things, and selling us the illusion that we are, in fact, seeing the world as it is.
Perceptions are predictions. Even beliefs are predictions. So why do we believe in the first place? The simple answer is: because it’s something we need to do.
Propaganda promises a better future. He promises that everything will be alright. “Trust the leader. We have everything under control.” And just like that, we breathe a sigh of relief.
Internal Propaganda plays the same game.
It works behind the scenes to calm the storm within. It is fueled by our deepest needs for security and stability.
Between 2010 and 2019, Jeremy Clifton’s team at the University of Pennsylvania mapped humanity’s deepest worldviews. Digging through social media posts, religious texts, novels, speeches, and philosophical works, looking for phrases like “The world is…”, they came up with 26 primary core beliefs about the world.
At the top of the list is a mastery belief: Is the world good or bad? This lens filters everything.
Below it lie several other dimensions, among them: safe vs. dangerous and seductive vs. boring. These generalizations help us simplify the world and provide us with a way to interpret the ambiguous information or experiences we encounter. Leaders who see the world as good and safe tend to enjoy more trust and empower others. Those who see danger or boredom lead through control and fear.
As human beings evolved over thousands of years, beliefs became drivers of our behavior. If you do X, then Y will happen.
All human progress rests on this idea. Our brains are driven by one fundamental mission: to keep us alive. To achieve this, they evolved to prioritize survival above all else. They thirst for two essential needs: safety and stability. Safety is about avoiding risk. Sustainability is about keeping things as simple as possible. The problem is that optimizing for these two needs can lead you to mental blind spots, wrong decisions—and sometimes even concrete walls. Understanding this is the first key to empowering your brain to make better choices.
Taken from Bigthink.com. Brought to Albanian Tesheshi.com
Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist. He studied the science of influence at Harvard and MIT and has researched propaganda closely in North Korea, Rwanda and Afghanistan. His TEDx talk has been viewed more than 1.4 million times and he has delivered keynote lectures and leadership training for organizations such as Google, LinkedIn, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and Coca-Cola in 33 countries. An award-winning director and storyteller, he is also the author of the book Inner Propaganda.
Source: prizrenpost
