How much *do* we have in common?

By “common” I mean the objective reality. I look at an apple, you look at it, and we’re both like “Apple!” — we have that apple in common.

It all begins with the fascinating fact that your brain has no direct interaction with the objective reality. The senses you rely on — sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste — their information about the world travels through the limbic system before it reaches higher-level parts like neocortex (say, executive function). Which means that all — all — information is emotionally tainted before you start acting on it. This apple, is it good or bad for your survival? Or irrelevant? Don’t care, filter out?

Isn’t it fascinating? That your baseline of the experience of the world is preprocessed? It takes work to undo that, to re-filter and arrive at the original. From what I’ve seen, people basically form a bimodal distribution of how much objective reality they access: one group with the median around 30% and another one around 60% .

Due to a combination of neurochemistry, habits, and intention, people are anywhere from living in their own dreamy world to Dalai Lama. There’s no good or bad about it — in the end it’s all about adaptation and life is not judgy about how you arrived there — but there are a couple of practical observations.

One is that ppl from the different bimodal groups tend to expect that the other is operating in the same mode: e.g., those with emotionally backed inner narratives tend to accept people/actions that come from a “feel” and if you don’t feel it then there’s something wrong with you. The second group for the life of them cannot understand how someone would NOT choose facts, logic, etc. etc. And it’s a gap that’s hard to bridge.

Another practical thing is that if you’re the person with, say, 60% objective information — and you’re engaging with someone who has only, say, 30% — what do you think the chances are you’re talking about the same thing? 18%. Out of five apples, you have only one in common.