Don’t believe everything you think

One year, my apple trees were full to bursting, and my husband and I pressed them into 15 glorious gallons of sweet cider. Ten of those gallons were fermented and kegged. The other five were canned or brought fresh to our various friends and neighbors.

We brought some to the house of an acquaintance, a real lover of food, and a man known for his ability to gregariously exaggerate. He was so excited when we handed him a gallon of fresh cider, that he made a booming announcement to the rest of the guests.

“Who wants some hand-pressed, unpasteurized, organic apple cider?”

I was amused, because none of his descriptors were right. First of all, it was machine pressed. Second, our apple trees aren’t truly organic, though we do our best. And lastly, in an effort to avoid giving my friends E. coli, I had taken great pains to pasteurize all 15 gallons of apple cider.

I wasn’t offended but I found it interesting how, given no particular details at all, this man had whipped up a sales pitch on the spot and shared it to the entire crowd. He had invented a charming story, all of it untrue, likely to boost me in some way to the group. He’s a great guy that way…a salesman, and one of the best tellers of tales that I know.

Humans love stories, and we are wired to tell them. All the way back to the first apple that came off of an Edenic tree, we tell stories to assign blame, to make ourselves or others look better, to confirm our version of the world. Stories are a hook to convey meaning.

Sometimes when we tell stories, we can exaggerate a bit. And not just in the stories that we tell others, but also in the stories we tell ourselves. Perhaps Adam, after accepting the fruit from Eve, really convinced himself that all of this “getting thrown out of the garden” business was her fault. Was he perfectly unaware that the fruit came from the tree expressly verboten by God? Probably not. But the way he protested made it seem that way.

All of this story telling has to do with the structure of our brains.

Scientists gained some insight into this inadvertently, after performing a last-ditch neurosurgery on patients with severe epilepsy. Seizures can start in one half of the brain and travel to the other half of the brain through a bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum. When this nerve bundle is severed, patients had a reduction in severe seizures and they appeared to be functioning quite normally.

Except-they were weird.

Sometimes their left hand would literally disagree with what their right hand was doing. Scientists decided to study them to see what was going on.

The left brain receives visual input from and controls the right half of the body. The left brain is also the part of the brain that can verbalize things. The right brain receives visual input from and controls the left half of the body. When the corpus callosum is intact, this information is shared.  When it is severed, the messages don’t pass through, and some weird things can happen.

If a message was shared with the right brain (through the left visual field) the right hand could draw or point to correct picture or object in response. If a message was shared with the left brain (through the right visual field), the left brain didn’t know the answer but would make something up that seemed plausible.

In other words, these patients would make up stories.

When showing evocative pictures (nudes were used in the study) to the right hemisphere, the patients would often giggle. When asked why they were laughing, the left brain, which didn’t have access to the picture, would make something up. The patient would say, something plausible but untrue, like the researchers were funny.

Since the left brain is the only one that has access to language, it has been described as the brain’s PR department. It’s going to come up with something that seems to make sense, even if it doesn’t have all of the information.

It’s going to tell a story.

This is not limited to split brain patients. We do this all of the time. It’s called Confabulation.

Confabulation is a lie we tell without truly knowing it’s a lie. We tell them to ourselves and others all of the time.

In my search for more freedom and happiness in my life, I’ve stumbled across this idea again and again.

It turns out that the stories we tell ourselves matter. We can build a whole world around the stories, trying to explain a life that is difficult or unfair. We rationalize and invent reasons why things are the way they are. This can affect how we feel about our lives and our outlook on the future.

I told myself a lot of stories over the years.  I took action in my life due to the stories I was believing.

Growing up, for example, a story I told myself was “If I can achieve things in life, then I will be worthy”.  Another one was “Being perfect equals being loveable”. Both of these stories, while not true, were the ones guiding my career choices and therefore my entire life path.

Confabulation set the course for my future.

One of my all-time favorite podcasters in the financial space, is Ramit Sethi, and he is crazy good at pointing out when people are telling themselves a story. He pushes them to elaborate, to explain, to make their story make sense to him. And, a lot of the time, his guests realize that they have been thinking about things through the lens of an erroneous personal story.

To reach the roots of our own confabulations, it’s nice to have someone like Ramit walk us through it, but its not always possible. Sometimes we have to catch ourselves telling a story and start to become curious about why we tell it. We need to get familiar with the tales we tell ourselves. And we need to question whether or not they are true.

And, when we question ourselves, we need to pay attention to where the answers are coming from. Is the left brain offering us even more confabulatory fodder? And, if the right brain has a better answer, how can we get that answer when its unlikely to be verbal? Because even in people with fully intact corpus callosums, we tend to lean on verbal language.

The answer is three-fold.

One, we might feel something in our body. American psychologist Louis Cozolino points out that the right brain silently provides information to the left in the form of intuition, feelings, and visual images. So the right brain is communicating something, but we might not be listening. When we can tune into those gentler feelings, we might get a different message from the left brain.

Two, it might be helpful to tune out of all thought for a while. Using a practice like mediation can allow us to let go of some of our stories.

Three, cultivate awareness of the thoughts we have. Staying up on the latest stories the mind generates is critical to catching confabulation, both new and old.

All of this to say, you don’t have to believe everything you think. I’ll raise a glass of cider to that.