What do you think?
Rate this book
A Trick Of The Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality
'With captivating storytelling and cutting-edge science, neuroscientist Daniel Yon explores the power and the perils of the brain's internal models, offering a provocative look at the hidden forces shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and even our sanity. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew' Daniel Z. Lieberman, author of The Molecule of More
'This book will profoundly change the way you consider your own mind' Lewis Dartnell, bestselling author of The Knowledge, Origins and Being Human
'You will not a find a more up-to-date or more compelling account of how a mind emerges from the brain' Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London
'An engaging, informative, and genuinely entertaining guide to the many weird ways in which our brains create the world we live in' Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain
How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realising that the answer lies much closer to home than it seems.
The latest research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.
In this book Daniel Yon takes the research one step further, uncovering how your brain colours your perception of the world, the judgements you make about other people and the beliefs you form about yourself. With transformative applications for how we engage with other communities and approach mental illness, A Trick of The Mind will revolutionise the way you think.
'This book will profoundly change the way you consider your own mind' Lewis Dartnell, bestselling author of The Knowledge, Origins and Being Human
'You will not a find a more up-to-date or more compelling account of how a mind emerges from the brain' Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London
'An engaging, informative, and genuinely entertaining guide to the many weird ways in which our brains create the world we live in' Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain
How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realising that the answer lies much closer to home than it seems.
The latest research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.
In this book Daniel Yon takes the research one step further, uncovering how your brain colours your perception of the world, the judgements you make about other people and the beliefs you form about yourself. With transformative applications for how we engage with other communities and approach mental illness, A Trick of The Mind will revolutionise the way you think.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 26, 2025
41 people are currently reading
525 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 16, 2025
Yon explains how, as is the majority view in cognitive psychology, the brain constructs a view of reality based on the patterns it can see. The content is useful, and many of the studies interesting (especially one into delayed gratification which measured how children's experiences of the reliability of their interviewer included their risk decisions over marshmallow supply). I did find the tone - which frequently went for cheap shots - a bit at odds with a book arguing against stereotypes and exposing how assumptions and partial simplifications our brains are predisposed to can lead to bias. But the content is current and the perspective intriguing and generally convincing
November 9, 2025
really good book. or maybe thats just what my brain wants me to think...
November 24, 2025
Philosopher Karl Popper suggested we actually live in three overlapping worlds: the material world of matter and molecules, the mental world of people and their hidden thoughts, and the world of ideas – our languages, myths, and paradigms that live beyond any one individual.
notes:
- When you look at a loved one’s face, what falls onto your retina is only a flat, two-dimensional pattern of light and shadow. From that shadow alone, there are countless possible objects that could have produced it. The brain’s task is what engineers call an “ill-posed inverse problem”: trying to reconstruct a three-dimensional reality from incomplete, uncertain data.
- Modern neuroscience frames perception as hypothesis testing.
- Research shows that people prone to hallucinations often rely more heavily on prior knowledge when interpreting ambiguous sights or sounds. Their brains don’t just register what is there; they actively fill in what they expect to be there, sometimes so powerfully that expectation becomes experience.
- The task of a healthy mind is to keep that balance between expectations and experience nimble – to use predictions to stabilize our understandings, but to let evidence tug them in a new direction when appropriate.
on cause and affect
- There have also been a number of studies about our willingness to inflict pain on others, which also will change based on circumstances. How many painful electric shocks would you give a stranger in order to hold on to a stack of free money? Experiments suggest that, when you have the money in your hand, you’ll be more willing to inflict pain than you were under hypothetical circumstances.
- Every day we’re attempting to decode other people’s intentions and emotions, even when their signals are ambiguous. To cope, the brain runs what’s called a “Galileo maneuver”: it first points its instruments inward, using firsthand knowledge of how feelings drive our own movements, then projects those models outward to interpret others. Motion can tell us a lot: buoyant steps often signal joy, heavy movements sadness, sharp bursts signal anger.
- When a person’s gestures and tempos are different from our own, it can lead to what’s known as a “double empathy problem.” In one revealing study, researchers used simple animated drawings and asked participants to describe what was happening. Neurotypical researchers observed that autistic participants struggled to explain the movements of the figures. But when the roles were reversed – when autistic participants created their own animated stories – the researchers found themselves unable to follow the narrative.
- It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that people with richer and more varied social experiences develop a deeper well of knowledge for recognizing different traits and expressions. Just like machine-learning algorithms, our mental models absorb whatever data we feed them.
- The joy we feel when we get a hit of dopamine isn’t just related to the pleasures of hedonistic pursuits. It also comes down to our brains being wired for curiosity, and the joy of discovering and learning. One of our defining characteristics is our innate drive to chase understanding even when it has no obvious payoff. Why else build particle accelerators or spend evenings lost in philosophy?
- Scientists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” Gains feel good at first, then expectations catch up and the high fades. But this applies as much to money and food as is does to information. Knowledge itself has become delicious. It’s why learning can feel more rewarding than winning.
- curiosity replenishes itself
- The psychologist Donald Campbell has argued that universities and organizations will generate more creative breakthroughs when they stop creating silos and start overlapping their expertise
- Noradrenaline, released from the locus coeruleus, signals volatility and can make us latch on to flimsy evidence. Interestingly enough, when people take beta-blockers like propranolol, it can dampen the effect, make the world feel steadier, and lead toward more level-headed decision making. On the other hand, stimulants like Ritalin can boost production of noradrenaline, causing us to switch our beliefs faster.
notes:
- When you look at a loved one’s face, what falls onto your retina is only a flat, two-dimensional pattern of light and shadow. From that shadow alone, there are countless possible objects that could have produced it. The brain’s task is what engineers call an “ill-posed inverse problem”: trying to reconstruct a three-dimensional reality from incomplete, uncertain data.
- Modern neuroscience frames perception as hypothesis testing.
- Research shows that people prone to hallucinations often rely more heavily on prior knowledge when interpreting ambiguous sights or sounds. Their brains don’t just register what is there; they actively fill in what they expect to be there, sometimes so powerfully that expectation becomes experience.
- The task of a healthy mind is to keep that balance between expectations and experience nimble – to use predictions to stabilize our understandings, but to let evidence tug them in a new direction when appropriate.
on cause and affect
- There have also been a number of studies about our willingness to inflict pain on others, which also will change based on circumstances. How many painful electric shocks would you give a stranger in order to hold on to a stack of free money? Experiments suggest that, when you have the money in your hand, you’ll be more willing to inflict pain than you were under hypothetical circumstances.
- Every day we’re attempting to decode other people’s intentions and emotions, even when their signals are ambiguous. To cope, the brain runs what’s called a “Galileo maneuver”: it first points its instruments inward, using firsthand knowledge of how feelings drive our own movements, then projects those models outward to interpret others. Motion can tell us a lot: buoyant steps often signal joy, heavy movements sadness, sharp bursts signal anger.
- When a person’s gestures and tempos are different from our own, it can lead to what’s known as a “double empathy problem.” In one revealing study, researchers used simple animated drawings and asked participants to describe what was happening. Neurotypical researchers observed that autistic participants struggled to explain the movements of the figures. But when the roles were reversed – when autistic participants created their own animated stories – the researchers found themselves unable to follow the narrative.
- It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that people with richer and more varied social experiences develop a deeper well of knowledge for recognizing different traits and expressions. Just like machine-learning algorithms, our mental models absorb whatever data we feed them.
- The joy we feel when we get a hit of dopamine isn’t just related to the pleasures of hedonistic pursuits. It also comes down to our brains being wired for curiosity, and the joy of discovering and learning. One of our defining characteristics is our innate drive to chase understanding even when it has no obvious payoff. Why else build particle accelerators or spend evenings lost in philosophy?
- Scientists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” Gains feel good at first, then expectations catch up and the high fades. But this applies as much to money and food as is does to information. Knowledge itself has become delicious. It’s why learning can feel more rewarding than winning.
- curiosity replenishes itself
- The psychologist Donald Campbell has argued that universities and organizations will generate more creative breakthroughs when they stop creating silos and start overlapping their expertise
- Noradrenaline, released from the locus coeruleus, signals volatility and can make us latch on to flimsy evidence. Interestingly enough, when people take beta-blockers like propranolol, it can dampen the effect, make the world feel steadier, and lead toward more level-headed decision making. On the other hand, stimulants like Ritalin can boost production of noradrenaline, causing us to switch our beliefs faster.
Read
November 24, 2025Our understanding of the world feels direct and unquestionable, yet "A Trick of the Mind" by Daniel Yon shows that what we call 'reality' is actually a construction assembled inside the brain. Instead of simply recording the world, the mind constantly generates predictions about what is out there, compares those forecasts against incoming signals, and updates its theories moment by moment. This multilayered process shapes everything: what we perceive through our senses, how we infer the thoughts and intentions of others, and how we interpret ideas, culture, and creativity. The book invites us to look beyond the illusion of objectivity and recognize that our experiences are built from a sophisticated dance between expectation and evidence, a process that can empower us to understand the world more clearly - yet also mislead us when predictions overpower facts.
Our senses provide only fragments of information, and the brain must transform these fragments into a coherent world. Every time we look at something, we’re viewing only a flat pattern of light on the retina, yet we feel as though we’re seeing solid objects in three-dimensional space. To solve this impossible puzzle, the mind relies on predictive models based on past experience. Higher brain regions guess what should be there, lower regions report the data they receive, and perception is the negotiated agreement between the two. This same process plays out when we listen to speech: instead of decoding every sound, we anticipate what words are likely to come next, filling in gaps when the input is noisy or ambiguous. When predictions overshadow sensory information too heavily, perception can drift toward hallucination - an extreme example of how expectations can become experience. Healthy perception depends on the ability to adjust beliefs when new evidence arrives, keeping the brain’s internal world aligned with the external one.
But perceiving isn’t enough. To act effectively, the brain builds a model of what it can control - essentially, a theory of 'me.' Each action is like a small experiment: press a button, move a limb, speak a sentence, and observe what happens. Over time, the brain learns what outcomes it can influence. Yet these models can be skewed. Sometimes we act as though we have more control than we do, and at other times we behave as if we’re powerless despite having real agency. Even feelings of responsibility shift depending on social context. When we choose an action freely, the brain binds action and outcome tightly, reinforcing a sense of ownership. But when someone else gives an order, the brain loosens this connection, as if responsibility has been offloaded. Our sense of agency is not fixed - it’s dynamic, shaped by expectation, authority, and the results of past 'experiments,' all of which reveal that our experience of control is a story the mind is constantly revising.
Understanding others is another construction the brain performs through internal modeling. Because we cannot access another person’s thoughts directly, we start by inspecting our own emotions and bodily cues, then project those patterns outward to interpret the movements or behavior of others. This method, while powerful, is imperfect. We read people most accurately when their expressions and rhythms resemble our own. When movement styles differ - across age groups, cultures, or neurotypes - misunderstandings arise. This is the essence of the 'double empathy problem,' where two people each struggle to read the other, even though both are acting normally within their own frames of reference. The more exposure we have to diverse ways of moving, speaking, and expressing emotion, the richer our mental library becomes, making us better interpreters of other minds.
Confidence, too, is built from internal predictions. When our expectations match reality, confidence strengthens; when we fail, self-doubt can take root. Early experiences of success or failure leave deep marks, influencing how willing we are to try again. But our beliefs about our own abilities aren’t always accurate because the brain’s self-monitoring systems are noisy and incomplete. Without new experiences to challenge pessimistic assumptions, underconfidence can become self-perpetuating. The opposite problem, overconfidence, can also distort how we interpret new evidence, making us cling to familiar beliefs even when they no longer fit. The healthiest form of self-belief is one that stays open to revision - strong enough to take action, flexible enough to update when the world proves us wrong.
Curiosity and learning play a central role in why the mind seeks new information. Dopamine, often associated with pleasure, is actually more tied to surprise - the unexpected mismatch between what we predicted and what truly happens. This 'prediction error' drives learning, exploration, and wonder. A fully predictable reward becomes boring; the joy comes from discovery, from glimpsing something that reshapes our understanding. Humans build particle accelerators, read philosophy, and chase knowledge because we are wired to find satisfaction in updating our mental models. Learning is not just useful; it is inherently pleasurable.
This predictive machinery gives rise to creativity as well. While artificial intelligence can mimic patterns and produce endless variations, human originality comes from the unique mix of personal memories, cultural influences, emotional associations, and social environments that shape our internal models. Ideas don’t emerge from nowhere - they are recombinations of concepts we’ve absorbed from countless sources. When diverse perspectives meet, creativity flourishes. Picasso’s revolutionary style, for example, blended artistic traditions from multiple continents. Human creativity isn’t magic; it’s the natural product of minds capable of mixing, mutating, and reinterpreting ideas in ways that machines cannot fully replicate.
Even our most deeply held beliefs are theories that the brain updates over time. During times of upheaval - pandemics, political instability, sudden change - our mental models become more volatile. Faced with uncertainty, the brain increases its 'learning rate,' becoming more willing to revise its theories. This can help us adapt, but it also makes us more vulnerable to false patterns and conspiracy thinking. Neurochemistry plays a part: noradrenaline levels rise in unstable situations, signaling the brain to treat the world as unpredictable. When uncertainty is overwhelming, even flimsy evidence can feel compelling. The skill lies in learning to tune how quickly we update our beliefs - staying steady when the environment is stable, and flexible when it truly changes.
Ultimately, the message of "A Trick of the Mind" is that our experience of reality is not a passive reception but an active construction. Our brains build worlds, infer minds, imagine possibilities, and constantly rewrite the models that shape our sense of truth. This process is powerful, adaptive, and creative, yet it also makes us vulnerable to bias, illusion, and distortion. Recognizing that reality is collaborative - part world, part mind - helps us navigate life with greater humility and curiosity. And the conclusion is both humbling and hopeful: as long as we remain open to new information, willing to revise our inner theories, and aware that our perceptions are drafts rather than finished products, we can continue to refine the reality we live in. In that sense, "A Trick of the Mind" reminds us that we are not merely shaped by the world; we are active participants in shaping it, one prediction at a time.
Our senses provide only fragments of information, and the brain must transform these fragments into a coherent world. Every time we look at something, we’re viewing only a flat pattern of light on the retina, yet we feel as though we’re seeing solid objects in three-dimensional space. To solve this impossible puzzle, the mind relies on predictive models based on past experience. Higher brain regions guess what should be there, lower regions report the data they receive, and perception is the negotiated agreement between the two. This same process plays out when we listen to speech: instead of decoding every sound, we anticipate what words are likely to come next, filling in gaps when the input is noisy or ambiguous. When predictions overshadow sensory information too heavily, perception can drift toward hallucination - an extreme example of how expectations can become experience. Healthy perception depends on the ability to adjust beliefs when new evidence arrives, keeping the brain’s internal world aligned with the external one.
But perceiving isn’t enough. To act effectively, the brain builds a model of what it can control - essentially, a theory of 'me.' Each action is like a small experiment: press a button, move a limb, speak a sentence, and observe what happens. Over time, the brain learns what outcomes it can influence. Yet these models can be skewed. Sometimes we act as though we have more control than we do, and at other times we behave as if we’re powerless despite having real agency. Even feelings of responsibility shift depending on social context. When we choose an action freely, the brain binds action and outcome tightly, reinforcing a sense of ownership. But when someone else gives an order, the brain loosens this connection, as if responsibility has been offloaded. Our sense of agency is not fixed - it’s dynamic, shaped by expectation, authority, and the results of past 'experiments,' all of which reveal that our experience of control is a story the mind is constantly revising.
Understanding others is another construction the brain performs through internal modeling. Because we cannot access another person’s thoughts directly, we start by inspecting our own emotions and bodily cues, then project those patterns outward to interpret the movements or behavior of others. This method, while powerful, is imperfect. We read people most accurately when their expressions and rhythms resemble our own. When movement styles differ - across age groups, cultures, or neurotypes - misunderstandings arise. This is the essence of the 'double empathy problem,' where two people each struggle to read the other, even though both are acting normally within their own frames of reference. The more exposure we have to diverse ways of moving, speaking, and expressing emotion, the richer our mental library becomes, making us better interpreters of other minds.
Confidence, too, is built from internal predictions. When our expectations match reality, confidence strengthens; when we fail, self-doubt can take root. Early experiences of success or failure leave deep marks, influencing how willing we are to try again. But our beliefs about our own abilities aren’t always accurate because the brain’s self-monitoring systems are noisy and incomplete. Without new experiences to challenge pessimistic assumptions, underconfidence can become self-perpetuating. The opposite problem, overconfidence, can also distort how we interpret new evidence, making us cling to familiar beliefs even when they no longer fit. The healthiest form of self-belief is one that stays open to revision - strong enough to take action, flexible enough to update when the world proves us wrong.
Curiosity and learning play a central role in why the mind seeks new information. Dopamine, often associated with pleasure, is actually more tied to surprise - the unexpected mismatch between what we predicted and what truly happens. This 'prediction error' drives learning, exploration, and wonder. A fully predictable reward becomes boring; the joy comes from discovery, from glimpsing something that reshapes our understanding. Humans build particle accelerators, read philosophy, and chase knowledge because we are wired to find satisfaction in updating our mental models. Learning is not just useful; it is inherently pleasurable.
This predictive machinery gives rise to creativity as well. While artificial intelligence can mimic patterns and produce endless variations, human originality comes from the unique mix of personal memories, cultural influences, emotional associations, and social environments that shape our internal models. Ideas don’t emerge from nowhere - they are recombinations of concepts we’ve absorbed from countless sources. When diverse perspectives meet, creativity flourishes. Picasso’s revolutionary style, for example, blended artistic traditions from multiple continents. Human creativity isn’t magic; it’s the natural product of minds capable of mixing, mutating, and reinterpreting ideas in ways that machines cannot fully replicate.
Even our most deeply held beliefs are theories that the brain updates over time. During times of upheaval - pandemics, political instability, sudden change - our mental models become more volatile. Faced with uncertainty, the brain increases its 'learning rate,' becoming more willing to revise its theories. This can help us adapt, but it also makes us more vulnerable to false patterns and conspiracy thinking. Neurochemistry plays a part: noradrenaline levels rise in unstable situations, signaling the brain to treat the world as unpredictable. When uncertainty is overwhelming, even flimsy evidence can feel compelling. The skill lies in learning to tune how quickly we update our beliefs - staying steady when the environment is stable, and flexible when it truly changes.
Ultimately, the message of "A Trick of the Mind" is that our experience of reality is not a passive reception but an active construction. Our brains build worlds, infer minds, imagine possibilities, and constantly rewrite the models that shape our sense of truth. This process is powerful, adaptive, and creative, yet it also makes us vulnerable to bias, illusion, and distortion. Recognizing that reality is collaborative - part world, part mind - helps us navigate life with greater humility and curiosity. And the conclusion is both humbling and hopeful: as long as we remain open to new information, willing to revise our inner theories, and aware that our perceptions are drafts rather than finished products, we can continue to refine the reality we live in. In that sense, "A Trick of the Mind" reminds us that we are not merely shaped by the world; we are active participants in shaping it, one prediction at a time.
September 17, 2025
I loved this book from beginning to end. It pulls together a variety of findings in neuroscience all the while being entertaining!
October 11, 2025
The mind is weirder than a platypus and probably will be the last great frontier for exploration. I found it fascinating how audial hallucinations presented itself in different cultures. In California, the hearers understood the voices as false percepts brought on by mental illness and the voices tended to articulate negative, violent, or threatening messages. In India, the voices were described as that of family members and would encourage and cajole the hearers to take a bath or do the shopping and were more often friendly or playful (not always.) In Ghana, the hearers understood the voices to be a special communication with God, and any negative voices were demons interfering, but largely described hearing voices as a positive experience.
Some psychologists think grandiose biases are hard-wired in the brain, with evolution simulation studies showing creatures with the bias have a selection advantage and pass that disposition on. A complementary idea is that such bias keeps us sane, believing we have agency (even an illusory one) at the core of healthy motivation and self-esteem. Ironically, people who are depressed have less of that illusion and see with more clarity our realistic lack of agency, making them "sadder but wiser."
"The "idea" of free will is an essential ingredient to the smooth functioning of human social groups, irrespective of whether free will is actually real in any metaphysical sense. Society is lubricated by praise to virtuous actors and the punishments visited on bad ones...."
Another scary finding given the fascist tendencies presently exhibited in the world is that coercive instructions disrupts the intentional binding illusion. When we voluntarily perform an action and it generates an outcome the onset of the action and outcome shift closer together in time. The reverse is true when coerced to do the action. Coercion reconfigures the sensorimotor processing of N1 brain waves. When ordered to deliver shocks to others, the brain showed a neural signature similar to when people are genuinely not responsible for causing an outcome. Yeah, read that last sentence twice.
Also, the more limited your interactions with a diverse group of people, the poorer your brains model of predicting what different people are likely to be like. Your perceptions of other peoples' mindspaces will be flawed, not realizing that irritability ties to impulsiveness, or friendliness to happiness. People with mindspaces more aligned to truth are even better at making snap judgments about people. Interestingly, extroverts are more conscientious/rule-bound.
Another interesting chapter discusses how AI/human minds are biased by what they are "fed." "Being exposed to inequality can lead to reproducing inequality...and it's much harder to engineer the social, economic, and political conditions where men actually do half the cooking."
In moral dilemma scenario, where person is given $20 but can pay to prevent others being shocked, most participants imagine they'd give up 90% of the money but in reality keep 60%.
Echo chambers aren't the only reason why confident brains stubbornly hold their views. Scientists found that even in perceptual choice studies (moving objects on a scree, unlikely to be tainted by motivation biases), confidence levels control how we integrate confirmatory or conflicting evidence. This has the advantage of not flip-flopping with every "noise" piece of data. It is a noisy world full of noisy brains. After our initial commitment, our brains become more sensitive to evidence that signals we were correct, and blunted to evidence suggesting we made an error. So if our brains lead to feeling inappropriately confident in our perceptions, thoughts, and choices, we tune out conflicting evidence, which makes subsequent biased decisions worse. Studies show political radicals at either end of spectrum were worse at changing their minds when evidence changed, even about flickering dots on a screen. The author called this a global failure of introspection, our metacognition gone awry that traps us in a distorted picture of ourself and of wider reality.
Furthermore, the more volatile the world, the more likely people are to believe incredible, incredulous things. When the world is stable, predictions based on the past are a reliable predictor of the present and future. But when the world is unpredictable, we should suspend our confidence in what we once believed. This linkage is born out in history: AD 64 Roman fire caused by small fire, winds, and densely packed buildings but Romans blamed Nero wanting to build city in his own image so Nero quashed the rumors by blaming the Christian minority; Black Death across Europe blamed on Jews poisoning wells rather than bites from infected fleas; and AIDS blamed on polio vaccinations in Africa rather than underlying virus. Letters sent to Chicago Tribune and NYT between 1890 and 2010 found conspiratorial ideas spiked at the height of the second industrial revolution - a period marked by rapid technological, social, and economic change. Can you say, hello COVID? Basically, any information received by the brain in this hyper-sensitive state will seem newsworthy and important and therefor able to powerfully revise our existing mental models, whether the information is reliable or not.
Compounding the above, people who are more paranoid in everyday life, behaved in an assigned task as if the structure of the task would be more volatile and unstable too. They were more likely to switch their choices. Interestingly, in the U.S. states with proactive lockdown policies and clear guidance, participants in an already ongoing study showed less extreme beliefs about volatility. The researchers hadn't set out to study COVID, only meant to study peoples' beliefs about the volatility of their lives in general. As beliefs about volatility went up, so did fantastical conspiracy thinking. And those with strong beliefs in one area, were also more willing to believe conspiracy theories in another area.
Some psychologists think grandiose biases are hard-wired in the brain, with evolution simulation studies showing creatures with the bias have a selection advantage and pass that disposition on. A complementary idea is that such bias keeps us sane, believing we have agency (even an illusory one) at the core of healthy motivation and self-esteem. Ironically, people who are depressed have less of that illusion and see with more clarity our realistic lack of agency, making them "sadder but wiser."
"The "idea" of free will is an essential ingredient to the smooth functioning of human social groups, irrespective of whether free will is actually real in any metaphysical sense. Society is lubricated by praise to virtuous actors and the punishments visited on bad ones...."
Another scary finding given the fascist tendencies presently exhibited in the world is that coercive instructions disrupts the intentional binding illusion. When we voluntarily perform an action and it generates an outcome the onset of the action and outcome shift closer together in time. The reverse is true when coerced to do the action. Coercion reconfigures the sensorimotor processing of N1 brain waves. When ordered to deliver shocks to others, the brain showed a neural signature similar to when people are genuinely not responsible for causing an outcome. Yeah, read that last sentence twice.
Also, the more limited your interactions with a diverse group of people, the poorer your brains model of predicting what different people are likely to be like. Your perceptions of other peoples' mindspaces will be flawed, not realizing that irritability ties to impulsiveness, or friendliness to happiness. People with mindspaces more aligned to truth are even better at making snap judgments about people. Interestingly, extroverts are more conscientious/rule-bound.
Another interesting chapter discusses how AI/human minds are biased by what they are "fed." "Being exposed to inequality can lead to reproducing inequality...and it's much harder to engineer the social, economic, and political conditions where men actually do half the cooking."
In moral dilemma scenario, where person is given $20 but can pay to prevent others being shocked, most participants imagine they'd give up 90% of the money but in reality keep 60%.
Echo chambers aren't the only reason why confident brains stubbornly hold their views. Scientists found that even in perceptual choice studies (moving objects on a scree, unlikely to be tainted by motivation biases), confidence levels control how we integrate confirmatory or conflicting evidence. This has the advantage of not flip-flopping with every "noise" piece of data. It is a noisy world full of noisy brains. After our initial commitment, our brains become more sensitive to evidence that signals we were correct, and blunted to evidence suggesting we made an error. So if our brains lead to feeling inappropriately confident in our perceptions, thoughts, and choices, we tune out conflicting evidence, which makes subsequent biased decisions worse. Studies show political radicals at either end of spectrum were worse at changing their minds when evidence changed, even about flickering dots on a screen. The author called this a global failure of introspection, our metacognition gone awry that traps us in a distorted picture of ourself and of wider reality.
Furthermore, the more volatile the world, the more likely people are to believe incredible, incredulous things. When the world is stable, predictions based on the past are a reliable predictor of the present and future. But when the world is unpredictable, we should suspend our confidence in what we once believed. This linkage is born out in history: AD 64 Roman fire caused by small fire, winds, and densely packed buildings but Romans blamed Nero wanting to build city in his own image so Nero quashed the rumors by blaming the Christian minority; Black Death across Europe blamed on Jews poisoning wells rather than bites from infected fleas; and AIDS blamed on polio vaccinations in Africa rather than underlying virus. Letters sent to Chicago Tribune and NYT between 1890 and 2010 found conspiratorial ideas spiked at the height of the second industrial revolution - a period marked by rapid technological, social, and economic change. Can you say, hello COVID? Basically, any information received by the brain in this hyper-sensitive state will seem newsworthy and important and therefor able to powerfully revise our existing mental models, whether the information is reliable or not.
Compounding the above, people who are more paranoid in everyday life, behaved in an assigned task as if the structure of the task would be more volatile and unstable too. They were more likely to switch their choices. Interestingly, in the U.S. states with proactive lockdown policies and clear guidance, participants in an already ongoing study showed less extreme beliefs about volatility. The researchers hadn't set out to study COVID, only meant to study peoples' beliefs about the volatility of their lives in general. As beliefs about volatility went up, so did fantastical conspiracy thinking. And those with strong beliefs in one area, were also more willing to believe conspiracy theories in another area.
November 24, 2025
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)
We are not passive observers, but prediction-makers whose brains are constantly guessing the world into being.
Executive Summary
Yon argues that the brain builds reality by blending sensory input with internal predictions. He connects illusions, biases, and even everyday misunderstandings to this predictive machinery.
The book is built on philosopher Karl Popper’s 3 worlds framework. He suggested that reality is not a single, solid thing – it’s layered. We actually live in three overlapping worlds: the material world of matter and molecules, the mental world of people and their hidden thoughts, and the world of ideas – our languages, myths, and paradigms that live beyond any one individual.
Review
This book gave me language for something I run into constantly as a learning scientist: people don’t learn by absorbing facts; they learn by updating predictions. Yon’s examples made that idea vivid. When a student misinterprets a concept, it isn’t failure — it’s an older model still doing its job. That reframing alone made the book worth reading. It’s approachable, occasionally playful, and just technical enough to feel sturdy without dragging. I did wish for more concrete applications, but the core insight has already changed how I design instruction and give feedback.
Similar Reads
How We Learn — clear cognitive science for educators.
The Invisible Gorilla — why attention and perception fail us.
The Predictive Mind — a deeper philosophical angle on prediction.
Authorship Note: This review was co-authored using a time-saving GPT I built to help structure and refine my thoughts.
We are not passive observers, but prediction-makers whose brains are constantly guessing the world into being.
Executive Summary
Yon argues that the brain builds reality by blending sensory input with internal predictions. He connects illusions, biases, and even everyday misunderstandings to this predictive machinery.
The book is built on philosopher Karl Popper’s 3 worlds framework. He suggested that reality is not a single, solid thing – it’s layered. We actually live in three overlapping worlds: the material world of matter and molecules, the mental world of people and their hidden thoughts, and the world of ideas – our languages, myths, and paradigms that live beyond any one individual.
Review
This book gave me language for something I run into constantly as a learning scientist: people don’t learn by absorbing facts; they learn by updating predictions. Yon’s examples made that idea vivid. When a student misinterprets a concept, it isn’t failure — it’s an older model still doing its job. That reframing alone made the book worth reading. It’s approachable, occasionally playful, and just technical enough to feel sturdy without dragging. I did wish for more concrete applications, but the core insight has already changed how I design instruction and give feedback.
Similar Reads
How We Learn — clear cognitive science for educators.
The Invisible Gorilla — why attention and perception fail us.
The Predictive Mind — a deeper philosophical angle on prediction.
Authorship Note: This review was co-authored using a time-saving GPT I built to help structure and refine my thoughts.
September 22, 2025
I did like this book, at times I did wonder where it was going; I guess I should ask myself, did I give it fewer stars because I wasn’t sure, was not clever enough to see where Daniel was taking his audience.
I liked the suggestion that the brain is like a scientist, taking data from our senses and fitting them to theories that we already have about the world. I thought the segment on autism was insightful and wonderfully balanced. Certainly prompted me to think in a different way about neurotypicals and their vaunted emotional interpretation abilities (pssst, only works on other neurotypicals).
I think I got a little lost on the stability vs. volatility of data and our brains ability to handle that based on the level of anxiety the brain had faced during its life.
However I believe I was firmly back with the author at the end of the book and would like to assume that I now have some inkling of why the amerindians failed to see the ships in the bay on their first encounter with Columbus. Not mentioned in the book, but I have made the leap while reading the final chapter.
Loved the penguin joke btw.
I liked the suggestion that the brain is like a scientist, taking data from our senses and fitting them to theories that we already have about the world. I thought the segment on autism was insightful and wonderfully balanced. Certainly prompted me to think in a different way about neurotypicals and their vaunted emotional interpretation abilities (pssst, only works on other neurotypicals).
I think I got a little lost on the stability vs. volatility of data and our brains ability to handle that based on the level of anxiety the brain had faced during its life.
However I believe I was firmly back with the author at the end of the book and would like to assume that I now have some inkling of why the amerindians failed to see the ships in the bay on their first encounter with Columbus. Not mentioned in the book, but I have made the leap while reading the final chapter.
Loved the penguin joke btw.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 20, 2025
Outstanding. I had the pleasure of attending Daniel’s lectures on perception and awareness, and I couldn’t wait to read his book as soon as it was released. The ideas he explores are, in my view, some of the most fundamental, important, and fascinating in psychology and neuroscience.
Daniel is a remarkably engaging storyteller who guides you through a process of questioning many of the assumptions you hold, not only about perception but about your experience of the world as a whole. He does this with clarity, wit, and charm. His writing is filled with vivid examples and cleverly constructed arguments, inviting you to solve the puzzle alongside him.
I found it more insightful and personally helpful than years of therapy, offering frameworks and perspectives that immediately reshaped how I think and feel. The result is a book that makes complex ideas feel both accessible and applicable. You come away with a deep understanding of the concepts and a clear sense of how they relate to both philosophical questions and everyday life. A truly impressive and rewarding read.
Daniel is a remarkably engaging storyteller who guides you through a process of questioning many of the assumptions you hold, not only about perception but about your experience of the world as a whole. He does this with clarity, wit, and charm. His writing is filled with vivid examples and cleverly constructed arguments, inviting you to solve the puzzle alongside him.
I found it more insightful and personally helpful than years of therapy, offering frameworks and perspectives that immediately reshaped how I think and feel. The result is a book that makes complex ideas feel both accessible and applicable. You come away with a deep understanding of the concepts and a clear sense of how they relate to both philosophical questions and everyday life. A truly impressive and rewarding read.
September 27, 2025
An interesting and accessible guide to the inner workings of our brains, which gathers the most up-to-date knowledge of the subject. Written by a practicing cognitive neuroscientist, it is full of very specific examples and practical knowledge - although it may be a little bit mind blowing at times!
Thanks to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
Thanks to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
July 2, 2025
The mind does indeed play tricks
A summary of the work that is being done to understand the working of the brain.
Emphasizes that the brain forms a rendition of what we see and compares this to any new information coming in to arrived at an answer that is the most plausible and a. Urate
A summary of the work that is being done to understand the working of the brain.
Emphasizes that the brain forms a rendition of what we see and compares this to any new information coming in to arrived at an answer that is the most plausible and a. Urate
November 6, 2025
Let’s of interesting material but also a lot of repetition
November 7, 2025
Yeah, this got a little deep in the weeds for me. A lot of citing studies which honestly got a little banal and boring but overall this was alright.
November 24, 2025
the brain creates our reality, for better and, sometimes, for worse.
the brain builds theories just to perceive the physical world around us.
the brain builds theories just to perceive the physical world around us.
December 11, 2025
Review to come...
December 24, 2025
Oh dammit - now I'm just questioning the entire basis of my own sense of reality. Most emphatically not a 'self-help' book.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews