 Good mental health, regular podcast series that helps you to live a more optimal life. And we do that by examining the tweets of Dr. Neil Maranello, he's a behavior expert with near six decades examining the human condition. And he's currently a solution focus life coach in Woodstock, Vermont. Neil, it's a pleasure having you on the show as always. Our subject for today, what I see is not what's there. And I have to tell you, as I've been diving deep into it and going down the rabbit hole, I have to tell you, it's brought up so much for me. And when I examine the tweet, I come to it first by saying how true is it? How accurate is it in terms of my sensory perception and then its interpretation. And I can certainly say that, well, if you're colorblind for an example, you're not seeing color, what is really there or a mirage for an example. Again, your eyes are having tricks played on you. And the fact that then our spectrum of sight is only within a certain band of the bandwidth of true light, meaning that we don't see infrared light. So we're not seeing the whole picture of what's there. And then of course, the fact that the way that information comes through via my optic nerves, it's inverted, yet my brain then has to correctly interpret that. So there's all sorts of things that occur just within the perception of sight that is missing that of course makes this ring true. And then as I even dive deeper on what that means, it can be a pretty destabilizing thought, you know, that what I see is not, what is there? Yes, and they have done experiments in which they gave people glasses to wear that turned everything they saw upside down. And after a very short period of time, two or three days, people were seeing things right side up. So we're talking about visual perception. But of course, there's also other senses is auditory perception. And there's the combination of those and it all winds up getting interpreted by the brain. And the brain interprets things based on what you believe, based on what your particular, you know, as you said, whether you're colorblind or not, but there are several other variables operating here too. It's the term that we have used, significant means that you're giving meaning to something. And that meaning is being given by the brain, the mind, the part of you that chooses to give meaning to whatever you're perceiving. And maybe we should change this, what I see to what I perceive because that involves virtually all the senses. And sensation is only one form of input that then has to be interpreted by the brain and the mind. And remember, we have two minds, the conscious and the subconscious. So even in my reductionistic simplistic attempt to bring everything down to the Occam's razor, simplest explanation, it gets complex as hell. Really, really. And what I was thinking here is that, you know, then the responsibility really of your caregiver from, you know, in those first transformative seven years of life is really, really important because that's going to define how you interpret or socialize on what the senses are sending to your brain. So that's a tremendous amount of responsibility, I would think as a parent. And the other thing that came up for me is, I can see now how mental illness could be so prevalent because of that social conditioning or just of that premise that what I see is not what's there. But your caregiver, of course, is interpreting things through his or her system. And to the extent that his or her system may be distorted by beliefs that are more delusions than beliefs. Delusion being something that you believe to be true that isn't, but still controls your behavior. The interpretation of whatever, you know, if a child asks a parent, what does this mean? And the parent interprets it, you wind up with the child accepting that meaning. And the child, of course, is developmentally at an age when your child doesn't necessarily know any other meaning for it other than what is given to the child. So you have things like the old joke where the son asked the father, where do I come from? And the father goes into long detail about birds and bees and all the rest of that. And by the time he's done, the son says to the father, well, that's interesting, daddy, but where do I come from? Johnny comes from California. I love it. You know, the other thing that was coming up for me as I ponder this question and this theory was something that you had said in our last episode. And that is that it's the movie theater, that here is what is being shown and here is the screen and they're two very different things. So again, what I see is not what the movie projector is projecting out. That's exactly right. And so you can take any examples. For example, you reported what was going on in your mind when you killed yourself. And it had a lot to do with the idea that you were not worth anything and it was beneficial for everybody else. I think you see that now as very much of your own projection. But prior to that, there were all kinds of interactions between you and your father and your interpretation of what was going on in your father's mind certainly would have affected your perceptions. And so can you recreate now since you did die and come back to life what was going on in your father's mind at that time? Well, you know, rather than going into that, I look at it more in terms of, what is the big social construct right now that we're all struggling with and that's racism? And of course, if I were to give you a cup and ask you to go fill it with racism, you couldn't do it because we know it doesn't exist in the material world. It's a social construct. And yet again, if the screen is always seeing racism but that's not what the projector is projecting, you know, that screen is basically your belief system that maybe the caregiver has instilled in you. So that's all that you see regardless of what this movie projector is putting out, you know, that becomes problematic in our society or is again the social construct I would say that we're all struggling with today? Well, if you've been programmed to believe that a certain color of people is an indication that they are stupid or incapable of behaving rationally or less able to process information than you are, you've been programmed to believe that then when you see that color person, you project that assumption onto them. And of course, as being the example that I gave before of the little girl who was determined to be mentally challenged by virtue of an IQ test which required her to read when in fact she had never been able to, she had never been taught to read and went all the way through the sixth grade when I tested her and found out her IQ was 120. The reality here is that if the social construct says that you're, at that time it was called retarded, if the social construct says that you're retarded, everybody who sees you, including your teachers and including the child herself assumes that she is retarded. When the reality is that she was a very, very bright little girl that the IQ test that was given required her to be able to read when she hadn't yet learned how to. And so you have the exact same thing when you're talking about racism or when you're talking about what was going on in your head at the time that you killed yourself or what was going on in your father's head at the time or prior to that. It's the projection that determines the meaning that you give to it, the way you significant it. And that projection winds up controlling your perception of reality. That projection has a whole bunch of social constructs involved in it. And in order to actually see the whole picture you have to go back to it, recreate it in whatever way you can. And that's where that BASK concept comes in. It's like if you have a videotape of what went on between you and your father prior to your killing yourself, you would watch it over and over again and figure out what was going on in his head, what was going on in your head. How did you get to the point where you painted yourself into a corner of one floor of a building when in fact the building was inside you? And the other thing that came up of course with the topic again that what I see is not what's there is again something you had mentioned in one of our previous episodes about eyewitness testimony and how unreliable in fact it is that eight people can watch an automobile accident and all have complete different descriptions of what they saw. And I think there have even been some tests where they've tested people to watch video and okay, how many people saw the person walking by in a yellow raincoat and only a certain percentage of them did? Yes, it has to do with several factors. One is just the angle from which you're observing. And that angle in an accident or something like that is different from the angle of the other observers. So that's one variable. But it has nothing to do or it has very little to do with the projections. If you happen to be colorblind, the yellow raincoat is gonna look different. If you happen to have an aversion to yellow it's going to be different and you're going to focus on it. If the person wearing the yellow raincoat is black and you have a certain amount of projected ideas about racism then what you're going to observe and the way you're going to interpret it is different from what other people are going to see. That's why using your example if eight people see a particular incident you're going to get eight different versions of what happened. And again, unless you have a videotape of the thing and you watch it over and over and over again you're not gonna really figure it out. Yeah. And the other thing being again where your attention is directed in a sense and that, okay, maybe in that same instance I was focused on someone else so I only saw it out of the corner of my eye or whatever. And then I'm reminded of well, how many times have I like lost my keys and said well, I looked there but they weren't there. But of course, we know that physics they are or maybe they're not which then gets into our quantum discussion about 80% or 90% of what we see is really space. So it's, again, when I go down this rabbit hole of the question, what I see is not what's there. I mean, there's so many deep levels to this. Well, that's true, but I have to say that many times I've lost my keys or not been able to find them or other things. And they have always showed up. And after the fact, I've been able to explain how they got there. At the time I said, okay, I've got to recreate my movements. I've got to go through everything that I did. And it's really only by chance at some point that I will likely find it at some later time. If I can't find it the first time I'm looking for it. The simple fact is that you cannot recreate your movements exactly. And often what I have found is that what I was doing at the time was thinking about something else. And so my subconscious was the one that placed the keys in a particular place. And afterwards when I find the keys I can realize, oh, okay, that was what was going on. But if you're talking about going down the rabbit hole I get more deeply into, okay, what was I thinking about at that time? And was my subconscious trying to give me a message that this was important enough so that I should find it and understand that I was thinking about something that was not as important as where I placed my keys. Again, I always assume my subconscious is working for me, not against me. And if I make that assumption then I can interpret the fact that the keys were somewhere that I didn't look the first 10 times and realize that there's some level at which my subconscious was saying, hey, Neil, pay attention. And the other thing again about this theory, that again, what I see is not what's there, it just kind of brought up some unease in that this could be just very destabilizing. And what I was thinking is that I can see then again how mental illness can be so prevalent when we deal with such a paradigm where our senses which we rely on to inform our reality are not always correct. And that then the result of that may be stresses that are put on our psyche which may break at perhaps the weakest point which for some people might show up as an addiction or show up as abuse or some form of where that weakest link was that it might break for them. Well, yeah, I think that the only thing I disagree with about what you said is the idea that our senses are not correct. I think our senses are clearly giving us messages. How we interpret those messages has to do with how well we understand our senses and how well we understand the parts of us that are projecting stuff onto and protecting meaning onto the things. Right. Whether you're colorblind or not, what you see is what you see. How you interpret it, however, depends on all of these other variables, especially the variable of your belief system. If you have a belief system which is tangential to the circle of reality, if you have, I don't know whether I used the example before of if you're talking to me and I'm covering up a burp by smiling. Right. Yeah, you interpret my smile as being that maybe I'm laughing at what you're saying. And then you're off on a tangent from reality that you believe to be true and you can trace it back to the point that it touches the circle of reality which is my smile. The actual meaning of my smile, however, is completely different. And again, it comes back to interpretation. And so how can we, myself and the world at large, how can we make sure that our interpretations are correct or accurate? And again, I'm cognizant of what you have said in the past that the way of operating that you move about in the world is to do as little harm as possible to others unnecessarily. So I would assume that that's part of the answer to the question I've just posed to you. Well, part of what we're talking about is what's happening right now. You're talking to me, you have your perception and you have your version of what happened and you tell me what that is. And then I process it through myself and I say to myself, okay, is what Matt's saying? Does that fit with my system, with my way of understanding things? And if it does, I can validate what you're saying. If it doesn't, if I can think of another interpretation of what you're saying, I'll toss that out to you. And you can then process it and decide, oh, well, Neil's full of lony or maybe he has a point there. The trick is to understand that the way you perceive things is determined by the way you think. And if the way you think is assuming that certain things are hurting other people or hurting yourself or certain people are purposely doing things to hurt you, then I'm going to take issue with that unless it's pretty clear that that person is consciously evil. Is purposely going about doing something to hurt you. Yeah, we're speaking with Dr. Neil Maranello here on Good Mental Health, examining his tweets on his Twitter feed. You can follow the good doctor at coach Dr. Neil. Our topic on today's episode is what I see is not what's there. We've been diving deep down the rabbit all year because again, I'm so excited just that again, it comes back to what I think it's been an overarching theme of our podcast series. And that really is the interpretation or the meaning that we give to anything. And I guess part of my question is, here I am at 57 years old and my experience of the world has pretty much been formed. The first seven years being so formative and whatnot. And again, I'm curious about the dangers of groupthink and history is littered with the damage of groupthink that this wasn't accepted way of believing, whether it be like racism for an example, there was a whole generation who were brought up to think that just because of the color of your skin, you were superior or another was less than. And so that's the danger that I feel this could lead to when we say what I see is not what's there. But there's a potential for group psychosis, if you will. And if I can, I actually wanna bring this into a more immediate thing. Neil, one of the things that I'm kind of like fascinated about is Sasquatch, Bigfoot. And so either it's a mass psychosis that all these people are suffering from or it's real. And the same thing I would have to say about unidentified aerial phenomenon which I'm also very peaked at. Well, you know, there's something when people take pictures of Sasquatch, they are assuming it's Sasquatch. They're taking a picture of something, whether it's actually a yeti or whatever they call it, seems to be difficult to guarantee because I haven't seen any real close-ups. And so you can say maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, but those people who choose to believe that Sasquatch exists are basically choosing to believe that. It may or may not be a delusion, but I haven't seen any scientific proof of it. Then you talk about unidentified flying objects. Well, there definitely are unidentified flying objects because people have pictures of these things. But does that mean that there is life on other planets that are coming down and taking a look at us? That works very well for the movies and for the stories, but I haven't seen enough proof even from the stuff that's been released in the last year that there really are these things. And so you have the additional problem of the fact that when you're looking at the internet and you see pictures and you see stories and you see these fabrications that may or may not be true, but if you read something, the tendency is to believe, oh yeah, that experience is true. And the internal experience that a person has is valid for that person. That doesn't mean it's valid for somebody reading it. And that doesn't mean that when they write it down, that they write it down exactly as it happened. They may be adding certain details that make the story better. They may not even know that they're doing that. So you have this real problem of the only way you can actually get a sense of reality is to have the videotape of the thing go over it and over it and over it. I have not yet seen any proof of Sasquatch or unidentified flying objects as representing beings from other planets that convinces me that they exist. And I think what we're really kind of dealing with here is the fallibility of the mind, right? That in essence, all of our senses can be fooled and our interpretation of what we see can be skewed. So I think again, it comes back to the importance of being able to maybe separate a common sense from the mind to be able to try to put this input into a format that I guess each of us can live with. Well, a lot of that has to do with what is now called narratives or stories or parables or whatever you wanna refer it to. But one of the ways in which people give meaning to things is through stories. And those stories are passed down from generation to generation, but of course it can always be interpreted as a game of telephone. One story gets told to someone else and then tells the story to someone else. The mind of the person listening interprets it through their own experiences. And often a good story makes a huge change in the way you think and the way you perceive things. So we learn things in ways other than being proved or disproved by scientific experiment and the Bible is a good example. Anybody who interprets the Bible as absolute truth and things that actually happened is missing the context. The context of the Bible is that it was written by particular people who are trying to get messages across and say certain things and influence other people. And the extent to which those things act, records of reality, or the extent to which the parables of Jesus are absolute experiences of things that actually happened are interpretations. And it doesn't make the messages any less valid, but it does mean that you have to process it through the way the mind works rather than process it through scientific proof or disproof. Yeah. And in essence, you know, as you're speaking, it was just coming up that that's exactly what we're trying to do here is that we're discussing a very esoteric topic. We're going very deep in the hope is that you, the viewer will be able to interpret it in a way that has significant meaning for you that allows you to then live a life more optimally as you navigate a world where what you see is not what's there. Yes. And the crosscut that I use when someone tells me a story or a belief system that they have or a perception that they've had or an experience that they've had, the crosscut that I use is, is this person seeing and perceiving this experience in a way which is helpful or not? And by helpful, I mean, does it open up options for the ways that this can be interpreted that will enable this person to see more choices or does it paint them into a corner and enable them to be less fewer choices? And when you have the fewer choices you have, the more likely you are to be mentally unhealthy. I believe that the number of options you have in a given situation is directly proportional to the mental health that you have. But the other crosscut is who's getting hurt. How much and is what you're doing harmful to yourself or others? Wonderful. What a great topic today. I really have to tell you, I just love how it's kind of come around full circle here. Your final thoughts on the topic, what I see is not what's there in you. I believe that what we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we smell, all of the senses are valid inputs, but they can only be given meaning by the mind. And once you accept that the conscious and the subconscious minds operate interactively and that the subconscious mind is always trying to help you, it becomes possible to take a look at the experiences that you believe you had and re-evaluate it, re-examine it and determine what was really going on. Wonderful. We've been discussing the tweets of Dr. Neal Maranello, he's a behavior expert with near six decades, examining the human condition. He's a behavior expert and a solutions-focused life coach out of Woodstock, Vermont. Follow him on Twitter at coach Dr. Neal. On behalf of the Good Doctor, I'm Matt Kelly. We're both wishing you good mental health.