From the creative and magical to scientific and factual. This little excerpt is from the start of chapter four in How minds change, a wonderful book by David McRaney.

I’m sharing this because it’s so easy to forget that what we think is real isn’t actual reality. It’s just our brain’s interpretation of reality. And that means we can change our reality by changing how we think about it. When I feel like I’m being a crap dad or I’m getting angry, it’s this idea that helps me get back on track.

“The brain, trapped in a black box, slowly, effortfully constructs a model of reality that over time gets better at predicting and explaining the regularities in its environment that have excited some neural pathways and not others. Our experiences in the world begin with shapes and sounds and colours, and as we become increasingly better at perceiving them, we interact with objects around us and begin to categorize them. Later, when we are old enough, with the help of others who have already gone through this process, we add language. At first, we associate the currently agreed-upon sounds with the aspects of reality they describe, and then we learn lines that represent those sounds on paper, and off we go learning about things we may never directly experience, except through books about Paraguay and podcasts about serial killers and movies about teddy bears that can talk.”

Hopefully it’ll help you too.