Piece together the fragments of reality

When you’re in the moment, especially during a highly emotional event, the intensity of the experience can skew your perception.

Your hyper focus and high emotional arousal narrows your attention, which can override your perception of reality. It’s an adaptive response. Your brain prioritizes survival relevant information, and everything else falls to the wayside.

Isn’t perception funny? What realities have you experienced differently because of high emotional arousal?

Truth is, we’re all the unreliable narrators of our own lives. Our brains are not like digital recorders, perfectly capturing events. Our perceptions are influenced by an untold number of psychological factors. The way we recount our lives is subjective and untrustworthy.

In literature, film, and other arts, unreliable narrators are characters whose credibility is compromised. Twist endings, for example, force audiences to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. We’re left wondering how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.

I love these kinds of films. Leaving the theater, grasping at the straws of reality, it’s exhilarating to me. Realizing that the person telling the story was actually in an insane asylum, and then oh my god, did the story actually happen? Or was he spinning a web of delusion borne out of a serious mental derangement?

It’s the best feeling. I’m drawn to this because it reflects the way human perception works. Complex, layered and flawed. It’s subjectivity at its finest. Requires a lot of critical thinking to piece together the real story.

Which I think is good practice. We live in a world where everyone experiences things through their own lens. No story is objective or accurate. Therefore, sharpening our ability to spot unreliable narratives is a healthy and useful habit.

Questioning the information provided to us teaches us to be more skeptical of our initial impressions. Helps us to reconsider our assumptions before making decisions. And to have greater awareness of when someone, ourselves included, might be distorting the narrative.

My theory is, the better we get at coping with that experience, the more resilient we become.

I don’t know about you, but I’m cautious about accepting any single perspective as the absolute truth. Doesn’t make me paranoid and cynical and mistrustful. I simply accept the fact that in this movie called the human experience, there’s a whole lot of narrators. More now than ever before. And this multiplicity of voices can be deeply disorienting.

One idea to help people navigate this chaotic hellscape is with a simple browser extension. Here’s how it would work.

Thoughtpause is a plugin that inserts critical thinking questions at the end of any article, video, or podcast you consume. It automatically detects when you reach the end of a piece of content. It would then insert one of the predefined critical thinking questions into the page, prompting you to reflect on the piece of content you just consumed.

Of course, the attention window is narrow, since people move from media to media quickly. And we don’t want to be intrusive or unnecessary, particularly if people are looking for quick information rather than deep analysis.

But there might be just enough time to squeeze in a smidgen of critical thinking. Here are five potential prompts.

First, what assumptions is this content making? Second, is there noticeable bias in this material? Third, what evidence supports the claims made in this content? Fourth, how might this content be different if told from another perspective? And finally, how might the timing affect the interpretation or importance of these ideas?

Hell, we could even turn these little reflective prompts into ad units. Thoughtpause, instead of bombarding web users with annoying promotions about various shitty products, actually offer something of value.

We’re promoting thoughtful consumption.

Sure, we’re commercializing the act of critical thinking, but in our capitalistic society, people expect this kind of monetization.

Remember, in a world where all narrators are unreliable, it’s up to you to piece together the fragments of reality.

Eventually, you’re going to have to look at that baby picture and realize, wow, he really was a tiny little potato.

What realities have you experienced differently because of high emotional arousal?