Perception v. Reality

What people think is reality vs. what is actually reality. Definitely not a scene from The Matrix.

There are a lot of memes built around this concept. Many of them are funny and have some level of truth. Reality is very difficult to perceive in its entirety. Actually, it’s...pretty much impossible. So our wonderful brains build an image of reality based on things that happen to us. That’s our perception.

But what about when the brain builds a perception around a small set of experiences and data sets? That’s when you get people who say the Earth is flat, even though that matter was settled over 500 years ago.

The partner to perception vs. reality is “perception is reality.” What people perceive is what their reality is built on. And that’s a tool of manipulation. A baby elephant tied to a tree by a rope learns early on that it can’t go anywhere…so when that elephant is fully grown, a rope is enough to get the elephant to stay put…even though it's physically capable of breaking it (and probably the tree). The elephant’s perception is that the rope is an all-powerful deity. The reality is that the elephant can break it like it’s a string.