Did you know that your brain actively shapes our reality based on what we focus on?

BY KAHA GEDI

How can the same day feel so different? Let’s explore two perspectives from Anna, a student, who experienced just that.

Scenario one:

“Today I had to wake up early for school, but I dreaded it because I slept late yesterday working on an assignment I procrastinated. Thankfully, I finished it before the deadline, but that didn’t stop my day from being ruined. I just feel like a failure for not doing better, and continuously letting not only myself down, but everyone else as well.”

“Additionally, I went through a lot today. I lost my wallet, which someone found, and if you think it can’t get any worse, my teachers gave me loads of homework. I just want to sleep and hope tomorrow will be a better day.”

Scenario two:

“Today, being mentally drained was an understatement. I procrastinated on a project and woke up quite grumpy this morning. However, I plan to do better next time and learn from my mistakes. I apologized to my loved ones for being cranky and irritable, which is a big step for me, because taking accountability is one of the biggest goals I’m working on.”

“Better yet, during my third-period class, I was called down to the office, and I was so scared, because I didn’t know if I was in trouble or not. When I got there, they said ‘Here’s your wallet, someone found it for you.’ I was awestruck. I didn’t even notice it was gone, and I’m even more surprised everything was there. This made my whole day that much better. I think things are looking up for me, I will try my best to work on myself, have a better day tomorrow, and deservingly get some rest.”

Anna had the same day, but these two scenarios produced very different outcomes. In the first scenario she focused on the negatives which completely clouded her day, but in the second she focused on the positives while also regarding the negatives as well. My question to you is, what kind of movie will you replay?

Did you know that our brain organizes our days into scenes like a movie? Just like how in movies, directors and editors decide when one scene ends and a new one begins. How does the brain choose? Christopher Baldassano (an Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University) and his team made a theory that it is caused by major shifts in our environment. Whether that be: from home, to school, or the different classes in between, to a movie theater, to a cafe, entering a new place our brains create a new scene or boundary between those memories.

According to livescience.com, alongside that theory, they further hypothesized that “These boundaries are created by our own past experiences and feelings about certain events, or environments. So, while a change in environment can affect the segmentation of someone’s day, it’s possible that this influence can be overridden by our priorities and goals.” Which is what I was portraying in the beginning of my article.

To explore this hypothesis, they experimented. The study involved 16 short audio narratives, each featuring four locations: (a restaurant, a lecture hall, a grocery store, and another restaurant), and four social situations: (a business deal, a “meet-cute,” a proposal, and a breakup).

Volunteers listened to these narratives while their brain activity was scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers focused on tracking changes in brain activity, particularly in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which is responsible for perceiving and interpreting moment-to-moment input from our surroundings. They found that mPFC activity spiked when the key social events in the storyline changed, such as when the business deal was closed, or the marriage proposal was accepted. However, if the participants were instructed to focus on features of the locations instead, such as sitting down at a restaurant and ordering food, their segmentation of the events changed, as did their brain activity.

The study also revealed differences in how the volunteers remembered the narratives after hearing them. When the participants were asked to recall the part of the story, they were not asked to pay attention to, they forgot many details. This shows that our brain doesn’t just record what happens to us; it actively shapes our reality based on what we focus on.

I would like to conclude this article with a knowledge question provided by Christopher Baldassano himself. “To what extent does this [shift in focus] change the way that we either frame a story, or the kind of details they include?”