Michelle: A study found that on sunny days, the stock market is more likely to go up. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with a collective delusion we all share. What if our entire reality works the same way? Mark: No way. You're telling me my 401k is affected by the weather? That's insane. It sounds like something you’d read in a horoscope, not a scientific journal. Michelle: It's completely real, and it’s the perfect entry point into the book we're talking about today: Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently by Beau Lotto. He argues that our most rational decisions are constantly being hijacked by these invisible perceptual forces. Mark: Beau Lotto. I know that name. He’s a neuroscientist, right? But I heard the book got a bit of a mixed reception. Some people found it mind-bending, others felt the core idea was something they already kind of knew. Michelle: I think that's because the idea is so simple and yet so profound it's hard to grasp its full implications. And Lotto isn't just a lab-coat academic; he's a neuroscientist who founded something called 'The Lab of Misfits,' where he runs these wild, real-world experiments in public spaces, like art galleries and even old crypts, just to show people how their own brains construct reality. Mark: A Lab of Misfits in a crypt? Okay, now I'm interested. He sounds less like a scientist and more like a magician revealing the trick. Michelle: That's the perfect way to put it. He's showing us the trick behind the greatest magic show of all: our own perception. And the most explosive example of this, the one that truly broke the internet, was that dress. Mark: Oh, don't even start. The Dress! I was firmly on team blue and black, and I thought anyone who saw white and gold was completely crazy. It caused actual arguments. Michelle: It did! And that global argument is the key. It was the first time millions of people, all at once, were confronted with the undeniable proof that we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as our brain tells us it is.

Mark: Okay, so let's get into it. Why? Why did we see it so differently? It was the same picture, the same pixels on the screen. Michelle: It all comes down to context, or in this case, a lack of it. Our brains are constantly trying to figure out the lighting of a scene to understand the true color of an object. Is it a blue dress in bright, yellowy daylight, or a white dress in weird, blueish shadow? The photo was so ambiguous that our brains had to make a bet. Mark: A bet? Michelle: A bet. Based on your entire life's experience with light. If your brain assumed the dress was in shadow, it would subtract the blueish tint and show you a white and gold dress. If your brain assumed it was in direct, bright light, it would ignore the yellow highlights and show you a blue and black dress. Neither brain was wrong; they were just running different software based on different lifetime data. Mark: Wow. So my brain and my friend's brain were basically running on different operating systems. That's wild. But come on, that's a weird, poorly lit photo. Does this really apply to everything, or is 'The Dress' just a one-off internet fluke? Michelle: Lotto's entire point is that it's everything, all the time. We just don't notice it because we're usually in agreement. He uses the metaphor of Alice in Wonderland. We're all like Alice, all the time, falling down the rabbit hole into a world of sensory information that makes no sense on its own. Our brain is the one telling us, "That's a table, that's a cat, that's the sound of a car." Mark: So we're all living in a hallucination, but it's a shared hallucination, so we call it reality. Michelle: A useful hallucination! That's the key. Our brains didn't evolve for accuracy; they evolved for survival. Seeing the world "as it truly is"—a chaotic storm of photons and air vibrations—would be completely useless. We need to see a tiger as a tiger, not as a collection of orange and black patterns. Our brain creates a simplified, useful user interface for reality. Mark: I like that. A user interface. So my eyes aren't windows; they're more like icons on a desktop that my brain has created. Michelle: Exactly. And we click on them to perform actions that have, in the past, helped us survive. The problem is, sometimes those icons are misleading, or we forget we can change the layout. We get stuck thinking the desktop is the entire computer. Mark: That makes sense. But it also raises a huge question. If our brain is just guessing based on past data, what happens when it has no data to work with? What happens when you lose a sense entirely? Michelle: That is the perfect question, and it brings us to one of the most incredible and moving stories in the book. It’s a story that proves just how powerful the brain is at building a world from scratch.

Mark: I'm ready. This sounds like it's going to be good. Michelle: It's the story of a boy named Ben Underwood. Ben was diagnosed with retinal cancer as a toddler, and by the age of three, he had both of his eyes removed. He was completely blind. Mark: Oh, man. That's heartbreaking. Michelle: It is. But his mother, Aquanetta, was determined that he would live a normal life. She refused to treat him as disabled. One day, she noticed he was starting to make this little clicking sound with his tongue. Mark: Like a dolphin or a bat? Michelle: Precisely. He was, without any training, developing human echolocation. He would click, and then listen to the echoes bouncing off the objects around him. His mother encouraged it. She’d say, "Make the sound, baby. Just make the sound." Mark: That's incredible. So what could he do with it? Michelle: Everything. He could run, he could ride a bike, he could skateboard. He could tell the difference between a parked car and a parked truck just from the echo. His brothers would play video games, and he would sit next to them, listen to the sounds, and he could beat them. He was "seeing" the game through sound. Mark: Hold on. He could play video games? That just doesn't seem possible. His brain was translating the bleeps and bloops of a game into a spatial map he could navigate? Michelle: Yes. Because, as Lotto explains, information itself is meaningless. Photons hitting your retina are meaningless. Sound waves hitting your eardrum are meaningless. They're just energy. They don't come with a label that says "tree" or "fire truck." The brain has to learn what to do with that information to create a useful behavior. Ben's brain learned to do with sound what our brains do with light. It built a visual world. Mark: That's just... breathtaking. So his brain literally rewired itself to turn sound into a visual map. It proves the point that the information source doesn't matter as much as the processor—the brain. Michelle: Exactly. And it highlights the most crucial part of this process, which Lotto explores with another famous experiment: the "Kitten in a Basket." Mark: Kitten in a Basket? That sounds much cuter than a boy playing video games with his ears. Michelle: It sounds cute, but the implications are profound. Researchers took two kittens from the same litter. They put one kitten, let's call it the Active Kitten, in a little harness that let it walk around a circular carousel. The other kitten, the Passive Kitten, was placed in a basket attached to the carousel, so it moved whenever the Active Kitten moved. They saw the exact same things, for the exact same amount of time. Mark: Okay, so they had identical visual input. Michelle: Identical. But when they were taken out, the Active Kitten behaved normally. It would blink if something came near its face, and it would avoid walking off a visual cliff. The Passive Kitten was, for all intents and purposes, blind. It would walk right off the cliff. It didn't blink. It had received all the visual data, but its brain hadn't learned what any of it meant. Mark: Whoa. Because it wasn't the one doing anything. It wasn't connecting its own movement to the changes in what it was seeing. Michelle: Precisely. You have to actively engage with the world. You have to try, fail, and learn from feedback. That's how the brain builds its map of reality. Ben Underwood was the Active Kitten. He was constantly clicking, moving, and testing the world, building his perceptual model through trial and error. The meaning isn't out there in the world; it's built inside the brain through action. Mark: Okay, so our brains are running on these assumptions built from past actions. That's a bit depressing, honestly. It feels like we're just puppets of our own history. Can we actually do anything about it? Can we consciously change the programming? Michelle: We can. And that's the final, and most hopeful, part of the book. It's what Lotto calls the art of deviation. But to understand it, I need to give you a little puzzle first.

Mark: A puzzle? Okay, hit me. Michelle: Imagine you're in a room. On a table, there's a candle, a small cardboard box full of thumbtacks, and a book of matches. Your task is to attach the candle to the wall so that when you light it, the wax won't drip onto the table or the floor. Go. Mark: Hmm. Okay. My first thought is to try and tack the candle directly to the wall, but the wax is too soft. Then maybe melt the side of the candle and try to stick it to the wall? But that seems messy and probably won't hold. I'm feeling a bit stuck. Michelle: You're feeling what most people feel. You're experiencing what psychologists call "functional fixedness." Your brain has a deeply ingrained assumption: the box is a container for the tacks. That's its function. It's invisible to you that the box can be something else. Mark: Ah, so the solution is... empty the box, tack the box to the wall, and use it as a little shelf for the candle. Michelle: You got it. The moment you see the box not as a container but as a platform, the solution becomes obvious. You have to break your assumption. You have to deviate. Mark: That's a great little puzzle. It really shows how our assumptions blind us. Michelle: And this isn't just a party trick. This kind of fixed thinking, these invisible assumptions, can have life-or-death consequences. This brings me to the most powerful story of deviation in the entire book. It's about a doctor in Nigeria named Ameyo Adadevoh. Mark: Okay, this sounds serious. Michelle: It was. In 2014, during the massive Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a man flew into Lagos, Nigeria, and collapsed at the airport. He was taken to Dr. Adadevoh's hospital. He insisted he had malaria. The Liberian government, where he was from, was putting immense pressure on the hospital to release him, as he was a diplomat. The standard procedure, the assumption, was that it was probably malaria. Mark: But she suspected something else. Michelle: She suspected Ebola, even though it hadn't officially reached Nigeria yet. Her brain saw the same data as everyone else, but she questioned the default assumption. She refused to release him. When he tried to leave, she and her staff physically blocked the door. She deviated from the protocol, from the political pressure, from everything. She made the box into a shelf. Mark: And was she right? Michelle: She was. He was Patient Zero for Nigeria. By holding him in quarantine, she broke the chain of transmission. The World Health Organization later said her actions saved the country from a catastrophic outbreak that could have infected millions. She saw a different possibility because she was willing to doubt the obvious. Mark: Wow. So 'deviating' isn't just about being more creative in a brainstorming session. It's about seeing the truth when everyone else is stuck on the default assumption. Tragically, I read that she herself contracted Ebola from that patient and passed away. She's a national hero. Michelle: She is. Her story is the ultimate example of what Lotto calls "courageous doubt." It's the willingness to step into uncertainty and question the things we take for granted, especially about ourselves.

Mark: So it all comes back to this, then. We're living in a reality our brain built for us based on the past. It’s a useful construct, but it’s still a construct. But Lotto's point is that we're the only animal that knows we're in a construct, which means we have the choice to see it differently. Michelle: Exactly. And Lotto's big idea about free will is so powerful. He says our free will isn't in the moment-to-moment choices we make—those are largely reflexive, based on our history, like Libet's experiments showed. Our real power, our free will, lies in our ability to consciously go back and re-mean our past. To look at a past failure and decide it was a lesson. To look at a painful memory and change the story we tell ourselves about it. Mark: So you're changing the data that your future self will use to make its reflexive decisions. You're updating the software. Michelle: You're updating the software. You are consciously choosing your delusions. And that process starts with the simplest, most powerful act: celebrating doubt. Not seeing doubt as a weakness, but as the doorway to a new perception. Mark: I love that. So the challenge for everyone listening is to find one assumption you hold—about your job, a relationship, your own abilities—and just ask, "Why?" What if the box isn't just a box? What if the diagnosis isn't just malaria? Michelle: That’s the perfect takeaway. It’s about cultivating that habit of curiosity about your own certainties. We'd love to hear about a time you broke through an assumption, a "candle problem" moment in your own life. Share your stories with the Aibrary community. It's in sharing those deviations that we all learn to see a little differently. Mark: A fantastic and genuinely perspective-shifting book. It makes you look at your own mind in a completely new light. Michelle: It really does. It reminds us that the greatest innovations aren't technologies, but new ways of seeing. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.