Our world is only in our brains

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

“We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality”

“Life is 10% of what happens to us and 90% how we react to it”

These would be some of the famous quotes that are suggesting that our subjective experience of the world is far more impactful on us than the objective experience.

Our brains create a reflection of the world in our heads, or a simulation, you can say. It is of course very useful, for it allows us to navigate the world with very little information, for example, when travelling to a new destination we don’t need to know everything about the new place, the people there, all we need to know are some common basic knowledge like airports, taxis, currency and emergency number and that’s all we need to navigate the new place. This mental model is also very useful for allowing us to simulate how we would feel about something before we actually experience it, like before bungee jumping, we have already simulated in our heads how we exhilarating it would be. It also allows to perform thought experiments and work on abstractions, which is important for creativity, such as, manipulating various furniture and imagining how they would like after rearranging them before rearranging them.

However, this mental model is not limited to this, our mental model is so powerful it is capable of altering what we actually remember, how we view our memories, which are a concoction of light, sound, and emotions conjured by our brains, is heavily dependent on our mental model, we are applying all kinds of biases like the protagonist syndrome, confirmation bias, to our experiences before we store it in our memory.

This mental model is shaped by the things that we experience everyday, the habits we have, and made of knowledge we have, and we can shape how this model works by changing our perceptions, how we view the world and the response our environment gives us (how people act and react to external stimuli).

Our mental models are unique to each of us, and awareness allows us to suppress our own expectations, biases, beliefs, briefly so that we can take in the views of others, understanding a bit of their world, and thus enriching our own, broadening it, and making us more accepting of others, more accepting of ourselves, and when we experience something negative like a break-up, an accident, a failure, talking with others, and trying to look at our situations from other’s point of views especially of those less lucky than our ours allows us to be empathetic of them and thankful of our own, and when we get lucky and gain tremendous success, a lottery, looking at our situation from truly successful and wealthy people allows us to calm our minds and think deeper so that we don’t become impulsive or take our success for granted but realize that it is temporary.

Our mental models will continue to evolve and so will we and being aware of it will be extremely helpful to our lives.