Your brain hides ten million bits of reality from you every second.
Let me start with a real experiment.
In 1999,
the Harvard Psychology Department conducted a video test.
A group of students were passing basketballs in a room.
Researchers asked you to count the passes made by the team in white.
Halfway through the video,
a person in a gorilla suit walked right through the frame.
They stopped in the middle,
thumped their chest at the camera,
stayed for nine full seconds,
and then slowly walked out.
After the video ended,
researchers asked the audience,
"Did you see the gorilla?"
Nearly half of them earnestly replied,
"No."
"There was no gorilla."
When researchers played the video back,
those people were stunned.
In the same video, they saw that massive gorilla
thumping its chest right at them.
They truly hadn't seen it before.
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
Today, we'll unpack a chilling topic.
You think you're perceiving reality,
but you're actually reading an internal briefing written by your brain,
one that is heavily redacted.
This briefing deletes over ten million bits of data every second.
That's about one megabyte,
roughly the size of a photo or half an MP3 song.
It then presents less than fifty bits to you,
telling you,
"This is the truth."
"This is the world."
Let's look at the hard data first.
Neuroscience and information theory have already calculated this.
All your senses—
eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue—
send a raw stream of information to your brain every second
of about eleven million bits.
This isn't a guess.
It's calculated from the nerve impulses fired by the retina,
the vibration frequencies of tens of thousands of cilia in the cochlea,
and the thousands of touch receptors in every square inch of skin.
It's the sum of all these parts.
Of that, the eyes alone
send ten million bits per second.
They are the primary source.
However,
your consciousness—
the part you feel, reflect on,
and can describe with language—
can only process
a maximum of fifty bits per second.
A Caltech study from recent years
even estimated this number to be as low as ten bits.
Think about that ratio.
From eleven million down to fifty—
it means your brain performs a massive delete operation
every single second.
Over 99.999% of information is deleted.
The remaining fraction of a percent
is what you call "seeing the world."
Where did the rest go?
Nowhere.
It was imaged by your eyes,
it vibrated on your eardrums,
it brushed against your skin,
but your brain hit the delete key.
It never entered your consciousness.
You have never seen the world in its entirety,
not even for a single second.
At this point, you might think,
"Isn't this a flaw?"
"Isn't this just a lack of brain bandwidth?"
Let me tell you,
it's not a flaw.
It's a design.
It's the optimal solution filtered through millions of years of evolution.
Imagine you're a primitive human tens of thousands of years ago,
squatting by bushes picking wild fruit.
Over a hundred pieces of information flood your field of vision simultaneously:
distant clouds, nearby insects, the sound of wind rustling leaves,
the humidity of the soil, your own breathing rhythm,
the rumbling of your stomach, the path of an ant to your left.
If your brain honestly presented all hundred-plus pieces of information to you
and let you slowly decide which was most important,
then within three seconds,
the saber-toothed tiger hiding in the bushes to your right would have pounced on you.
The ancestors who survived
were those whose brains deleted information quickly and ruthlessly.
After the deletion,
only one or two critical signals remain in consciousness:
the wind shifted, there's a low growl, that shadow looks wrong.
This extremely blunt deletion ability
was inherited intact by your brain today.
It's not a defect;
it's the fundamental reason you’re alive today.
So how does the brain decide what to delete and what to keep?
This brings us to the most important theoretical framework
in neuroscience over the last twenty years,
called Predictive Coding.
Simply put,
your brain isn't a video recorder passively receiving information;
it's an active generator of predictions.
Every moment, based on all your past experiences,
it predicts what you should see, hear, or feel
in the next second.
When the actual sensory signals arrive,
the brain only cares about one thing: Is there a difference between the signal and my prediction?
The parts with no difference—
which are the vast majority of correctly predicted signals—
are suppressed immediately.
They don't enter your consciousness.
Only the differences—
that handful of mispredicted 'surprises'—
are upgraded into signals sent to you,
allowing you to perceive them.
For example,
the brain is like a seasoned editor.
It already has a draft for tomorrow's newspaper.
Every morning,
reporters send news from every corner of the city to the editorial office.
The editor does only one thing:
compares the live reports with the draft.
Everything that matches goes straight into the shredder.
Only the mismatches make it to tomorrow's front page.
The newspaper you open in the morning
is never a full account of what actually happened in the city;
it's only the handful of surprises the editor found unexpected.
There's a more precise description of this process in the brain:
top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory signals
meet in each layer of the cortex.
Differences are passed up;
predictions are pushed down.
The smaller the difference,
the quieter the consciousness.
The larger the difference,
the louder the consciousness.
This is why you don't notice any details in the hallway
of your home after walking through it ten thousand times,
but if there's an extra pair of shoes in the entryway, you notice instantly.
The parts that match the prediction are muted;
the mismatching shoe jumps out at you.
You think you're seeing the world,
but you're actually seeing the error between your prediction and reality.
The world itself
has never been fully seen by you.
This is essentially the continuous process of training and inference
of our carbon-based AI model.
Back to the gorilla experiment:
Why did half the people not see the gorilla?
Because the brain's task was to count passes by people in white shirts.
It launched a prediction: there should be white shirts moving in this frame.
A black, giant, slowly walking object wasn't in the prediction.
Since it was irrelevant to the goal of counting balls,
it was deleted.
It was deleted so thoroughly
that it never even entered conscious awareness.
It's like a file thrown into the recycle bin,
without staying on your desktop for even a second.
The truly frightening thing about this
isn't found in a laboratory,
but out on the streets.
In the 1990s,
there was a famous case in the Boston Police Department.
A young officer was chasing a suspect at night.
During the pursuit,
he ran past a group of people fighting.
Later, video footage proved
that the group was beating a fallen fellow officer.
But the pursuing officer insisted he saw nothing.
He was charged with perjury
and nearly fired.
Later, psychologists did a full reconstruction
proving his brain's prediction was focused on catching the suspect.
All signals outside of that mission path,
even a violent scene less than three meters away,
were completely cleared by his predictive system.
Legally, he was later acquitted
because science proved he truly didn't see it.
But think about what this means.
Whether or not you see something
doesn't depend on whether it happened in front of you,
but on whether your brain's predictive script at that moment
left a space for it.
There is a term in cognitive psychology for this phenomenon:
Inattentional Blindness.
There is also a sister phenomenon called Change Blindness.
Around 2000, Canadian psychologist Ronald Rensink
conducted a very famous experiment.
He showed an image to participants,
flashed a black screen in the middle,
and then switched back.
Between the two images,
he would secretly change a core object—
a cup on the table, a painting, or the color of someone's clothes—
to something completely different.
Most people took dozens of seconds to notice the change.
Some didn't notice it at all.
The most absurd variant of this experiment is the real-life version.
A researcher stops a stranger on the street to ask for directions.
Mid-conversation,
several workers walk between them carrying a large door,
briefly blocking their view.
In that split second,
the person asking for directions is swapped for someone else.
Different height, clothes, hair, voice, and even gender.
The door moves away,
and the conversation continues.
The study recorded that
over half of the participants didn't realize
they were now talking to a different person.
They just kept giving directions to the stranger.
Your vision is not a high-definition camera;
it's more like a painter.
It only paints carefully at the exact point you are staring at;
everything else is filled in by memory and prediction.
The clear area in the center of your vision is only about two degrees—
roughly the size of your thumbnail at arm's length.
Everything else is blurry.
The reason the whole world feels clear
is simply because your eyes jump several times per second,
giving the brain enough material to composite a clear-looking image.
At this point,
everyone listening should feel a bit uneasy.
This reality is far more serious than just 'making a mistake.'
It means that
the objective world you perceive
is a personalized, second-hand report customized by your brain
based on past experiences, biases, habits, and emotions.
Everyone's report is different.
Two people standing in the same room
are not seeing the same world at all.
So here's the question:
How does this filtering mechanism
decide what to delete and what to keep?
The answer is:
The sum of all your past experiences.
From the very first day you were born,
every time you learned this is edible,
that causes pain,
or this expression means Mom is angry,
you were quietly rewriting your brain's thick dictionary of predictions.
In terms of your carbon-based AI model,
these are the parameters of a neural network being constantly retrained.
Where you grew up, the language you speak, the books you read,
who you deal with, the money you've lost, the things that made you proud—
all of this
eventually condenses into a set of deletion rules
etched into your brain.
This set of rules has a particularly terrifying characteristic:
it is self-reinforcing.
Your deletion rules lean toward letting you see only
signals that confirm your existing beliefs,
while quietly deleting contradictory signals.
Psychology calls this confirmation bias.
But it's not actually a psychological preference;
it's a deletion command automatically executed
by predictive coding without your knowledge.
You think you are observing the world objectively,
but you are actually constantly collecting evidence
to prove that what you already believe is right.
After ten years of this,
you become more convinced than ever that what you see is the truth.
So, could this mechanism
be ruining the most important decisions of your life?
I've been in early-stage investing for over twenty years,
and I can tell you a heart-wrenching observation:
People who make big money in investing over the long term
don't do it because they are smarter
or better informed.
It's because their brain's deletion rules
are different from those of the vast majority.
There is a Warren Buffett quote that's been cited ten thousand times:
"Be fearful when others are greedy,
and greedy when others are fearful."
This sounds like pure cliché,
doesn't it?
Everyone knows the logic.
But at the peak of the 2000 dot-com bubble,
on the eve of the 2007 subprime crisis,
or during the months of crypto madness in 2021,
90% of the market was greedy.
They couldn't be fearful.
Why?
Because their brains had already deleted all the danger signals for them.
Think about this mechanism.
When everyone is making money,
you open your phone
and see screenshots of other people's gains.
You hear friends talk about stocks doubling;
you scroll through arguments for why "this time is different."
These signals repeat and are predicted correctly over and over,
so the brain judges: This is the norm.
No need to pay attention.
Meanwhile, record-high P/E ratios, off-the-charts leverage,
and contrary signals that a business model isn't profitable—
because they appear rarely and don't match your experience of profit—
are deleted by the prediction system as noise.
On the day of the crash,
most people say the same thing: "Why was it so sudden?"
It wasn't sudden.
Those signals were always there;
your brain just deleted them for you.
I personally witnessed a friend's story.
In late 2017,
before Bitcoin hit its then-record high of nearly $20,000,
he took a heavy position.
I talked to him almost once a week during that time.
Every time, he showed me articles he'd saved:
An analyst saying it would reach $100,000,
a miner's cost calculation, news of another fund adding to its position.
I asked him,
"Do you read the bearish reports?"
He said,
"I do."
"But they're worthless;
I ignore them."
Later, he gave back almost all his gains in that cycle.
When he reflected on it later,
he said something I'll always remember:
"It wasn't that I didn't read the bearish reports,
it's that after reading them, they didn't sink in."
His eyes saw them,
but his brain didn't register them.
It's not that he was stupid;
it's that his prediction system was filtering out signals for him.
His brain was already occupied by the prediction that it would rise.
All opposing signals were crushed into noise and discarded.
Buffett can be fearful when others are greedy,
not because he is braver than you,
but because he trained a different set of deletion rules over decades.
His brain weights P/E ratios, safety margins,
and discounted cash flows very heavily,
while weighting market sentiment and short-term volatility very low.
When the same market data flows through his optic nerve and yours,
what he sees and what you see
are simply not the same thing.
He didn't see opportunities that others missed;
he just didn't delete the signals that others did.
So the essence of attention
is never about focusing.
The essence of attention is deletion.
Where you direct your attention
is effectively telling your brain:
"Don't delete signals from this channel;
keep them."
As for everything else,
"do as you see fit."
Over time,
you become someone who can only see certain types of info.
And the information you can't see
determines what walls you'll hit in life.
Essentially, the parameters of their carbon-based AI models are different.
In plain terms,
their cognitive models are different.
This happens quietly in investing, in relationships,
in social interactions, and in every judgment you make.
It's happening all the time.
A person who only sees their partner's flaws for years
isn't because the partner truly has no virtues;
it's because the switch in their brain that labels virtues
as irrelevant signals has been on for too long.
A person who feels the world is unfair to them
isn't because the world is actually out to get them;
it's because their prediction system filters kindness into the background
and magnifies hostility into headlines.
You think you're making objective judgments,
but you're actually executing a deletion list written years ago.
So,
here comes the critical question:
If the reality everyone holds is a version customized
by their own prediction system,
does objective truth even exist?
Let me be clear:
I'm not saying reality doesn't exist.
The physical world exists.
Tables are hard,
hot water burns,
and a red light is a red light.
However,
pure, raw reality untouched by a cognitive system
is something you will never experience.
What you experience
is always just the compressed file your brain processed for you.
This fact
was discovered by some people 2,500 years ago.
The line from Buddhist scriptures,
"All that takes form
is move and illusion."
I used to think it was poetry;
now I think it's more like a neuroscience report.
Everything you see
is a product of your brain's predictions,
not the thing itself.
Zhuangzi said,
"You cannot speak of the ocean to a frog in a well,"
"for it is limited by its space."
The frog in the well doesn't fail to see because of poor eyesight;
it's because the 'ocean' channel doesn't exist in its prediction system.
The deepest path of spiritual practice—
whether Zen, meditation, or rigorous scientific training—
is likely doing the same thing.
It attempts to pause the brain's automatic deletion rules,
allowing information that was previously suppressed
to surface for the first time.
This isn't about making you see more,
but making you realize for the first time
exactly what it is
that you have been missing all along.
During meditation, you might notice your breath—
the breath that has been with you your entire life,
yet you hadn't truly felt it for a single second.
While writing, you might notice the subtle vibration of the pen on paper,
something you never truly touched before.
These things aren't new;
they have always been there.
They were just suppressed as background noise by your deletion rules.
To use another analogy,
the process of practice
is like closing high-CPU background programs in the brain,
such as greed, anger, and ignorance,
or the ego and self-attachment.
This frees up computing power for real information
to enter your conscious processing,
rendering a world that is richer and closer to reality.
Of course,
turning off all deletion rules is impossible,
nor should you.
Without deletion, you would collapse in three seconds,
as consciousness cannot handle a flood of 11 million bits.
The goal of practice is not to turn it off,
but to make it visible to you.
To see your deletion rules at work,
to see what they are deleting for you,
and to see if what's being deleted truly should be.
I have no final conclusion for you.
In this episode, I just want to present you with a fact:
Your brain performs a censorship every single second.
It deletes 99.999% of input,
and hands you the remaining fraction of a percent,
telling you, "This is the world."
This censorship began the moment you were born
and continues to this day,
never stopping for a moment.
What's interesting is that today,
as you listen to this,
that censorship is still at work.
It is deciding for you which parts of this talk are worth remembering
and which can be discarded.
By the time you turn off this video,
it will have already finished the job.
Finally, I want to ask you:
When was the last time you noticed something
that you had been overlooking for a long time?
Maybe you suddenly realized a family member's
expression has been different for a long time.
Maybe in a review, you found that signs of an investment loss
had actually been there all along.
Or maybe while reading, you suddenly
heard that voice in your head that is always talking.
Share that moment in the comments,
and let's compare
to see just how different everyone's deletion rules are.
The most interesting thing was never what we saw,
but what exactly it is that we have missed our entire lives.
I am Wang Lijie.
See you next time.