How your brain affects your mind with Alex Rosenthal and Susan G. Wardle

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2:31Maybe a doctor, maybe just someone who seems to have their life together. They're talking about some new product that has changed everything for them. They look good. They sound confident. And the product they're describing, it sounds exactly like something you've dreamed existed. Granting you more energy, faster recovery times, sharper focus, leaner body composition, slower aging, maybe even a longer life. And it sounds almost too good to question. That moment of what if this is real is what this episode is about. not the product, the moment. And that's what caught my attention this week. The brain doesn't just passively take reality in like a video camera.

3:15It gets involved. It fills in blanks. It makes guesses, builds meaning. And one of the things it's extraordinarily good at is recognizing a story that fits what we already want to believe. When we're tired or in pain or just quietly worn down by the gap between how we feel and how we want to feel, we become very good at hearing evidence where there isn't any. Wellness marketing has learned to speak directly to that part of us. At wellness clinics, in longevity circles, and all over social media, treatments get pitched with a cool assurance. Ad language borrows the texture of science without requiring any of the actual proof.

3:59And certain words get tossed around like a stamp of approval. They sound high-tech or natural. They sound like something our bodies already make. And to a lot of people, they sound safer than they really are. Sometimes they are real and safe. So let's go back to that miracle product you saw in your reel. Right now, the trend catching fire in wellness spaces is peptide injections. You've probably heard of GLP-1 medications, like Ozempic. we govi, drugs that have genuinely transformed how we treat obesity and type 2 diabetes. These are peptides. Insulin is also a peptide. There are legitimate FDA-approved peptide-based medicines with rigorous clinical research behind them.

4:44And that legitimacy, that real scientific track record, is part of what makes the category so easy to exploit. But the trendy version of peptides that's caught fire in wellness culture is murkier. Right now, the idea of peptides is powerful enough to move product without any additional context. And there's potential that the word is doing a lot of borrowed credibility work. The miracle peptide injections being sold for anti-aging, muscle gain, and blanket optimization? Science doesn't usually support those claims. Most of the time, they haven't been approved by the FDA either. This goes beyond peptides, though.

5:25They're just the wellness trend of the day. The talks in today's episode actually dig into this bigger idea. Why do we want to believe things that aren't always true? So we're going to dig into this space from the inside out. These talks look at how differently human minds can be wired, and how perception itself varies so dramatically from person to person that what feels like obvious reality to one mind can be completely invisible to another. They ask what this means for how we make important decisions about our lives, like how we evaluate a claim that someone is making about our health. First up, a talk from animator and puzzle wizard Alex Rosenthal.

6:09Alex lives with a condition where a person literally can't form mental images. Drawing from his experience, he challenges us to let go of the idea that there's some normal mind out there. Instead, human thinking is a spectrum. It's packed with variation and full of abilities that only get better when different kinds of minds work together. Here's Alex Rosenthal at TED Next. So in 2015, a bride-to-be uploaded a picture of a dress to the internet, and we all lost our minds. If you see this as blue and black, say, Team Blue. If you see this as white and gold, how? How do you see that as white and gold?

6:54Why does this break our brains so much? It's because it puts us into confrontation with the fact that two minds can perceive the same reality entirely differently. I'd like to talk to you about two things. One, our minds are much more different than we think. And two, you should seek out minds that are different than your own, because that's where the magic happens. I get to work with a lot of diverse minds by virtue of what I do. I write and produce scripts for animation on a wide variety of topics, and I create puzzles and games. And a few years ago, I had my own dress moment, where I realized that my brain works differently than almost everyone I know, and I'd like to show you how.

7:37So if you'll indulge me for a second, please visualize the following. You can do it with your eyes open or closed, whichever gives you the most vivid mental imagery. A rocket ship crash lands on an alien planet. A creature comes up to the hatch and knocks, and someone opens it from within. So now I'm going to ask you some questions about what you just saw. What color was the planet? What kind of creature was it? And who opened the hatch? I'll show you what I see. Nothing! That's because I have a condition called aphantasia, which is where I don't have access to my mind's eye. It turns out that the mind's eye is a spectrum.

8:21On one end are about 2 to 4 percent of us with aphantasia, and at the other extreme is hyperphantasia. That's where you can visualize an exquisite detail, sometimes even able to superimpose what you're imagining on reality. That's about 3 to 6 percent of people. Everyone else is somewhere in between, but there's a huge range of experience here. Everyone I do this with not only describes something different, but describes the experience of experiencing it differently. So I went through most of my life assuming that most people were, or everyone was like me, that visualization exercise like this is a figure of speech that no one could actually do.

9:00So imagine my surprise and fascination and apprehension when I learned about aphantasia, the last because it raised some scary questions like, have I been working in entirely the wrong careers my entire life? So aphantasia changes the way that those of us who have it perceive information and consume and process information. So, for example, most people I speak to who have a mind's eye describe the experience of reading a novel as seeing scenes play out in their mind and casting characters. I can't do either of those things. It's a much more conceptual experience for me. And when something is out of sight, it's very much out of mind.

9:41I have a five-year-old daughter. I can't in this moment imagine her face. That has a big effect on my memory. And it's also not just my mind's eye, it's also my mind's ear. I think I have a little bit of a mind's ear, but I don't have a mind's nose or a mind's mouth. I can't, for example, imagine the taste of peanut butter. And what's it like to think in the absence of a mind's eye? That's a really tough question that's not that far off from asking what's it like to be a dolphin or a spider. And in the absence of being able to inhabit each other's consciousnesses, we can communicate about them.

10:18So for me, I'm generally much more aware of something skeleton than its skin. I'm very attuned to structure. When I'm creating a game or a puzzle, I'm first dreaming up the mechanics and figuring out how they relate to each other, how they map to a story structure, and the details come later, often in collaboration with other artists. I realize there's a leap of faith here in this idea that our minds can be so alien to each other, and I struggle with that too. I can't understand what it's like to visualize any more than I can see the dress as white and gold. But what's become increasingly apparent is that the mind's eye is just one of many constellations we're starting to draw in a night sky full of neurological diversity.

11:01That includes having or not having an interior monologue. It includes the autism spectrum, ADHD, dyslexia, and a lot more. Probably a lot of things we have yet to even give a name to, because we're just figuring all this out. The norm is to pathologize these experiences into a list of conditions that depart from a so-called normal functioning of the mind. I think we're thinking about this completely wrong. There is no true normal out there, and difference is not deviance. Rather, these are all clues towards a vast and profound star field we're each individually blinded to because we only have our one cozy, inescapable mind as a single reference point.

11:42It's no secret that different people think differently. Many people on the autism spectrum excel at pattern recognition and logical deduction. Multiple studies have shown students with ADHD outperforming, on average, their peers at creative problem-solving and divergent thinking tasks, and there are very similar findings for dyslexia, especially when it comes to advanced spatial reasoning. So if difference is, in fact, the norm, what do we do with that? I say seek out minds that are different than your own and make something incredible together. There's a wealth of research that shows that teams of people from diverse backgrounds produce superior outcomes.

12:20I'd like to propose a corollary to this. Diverse minds working together can produce wonders. This comes with challenges and opportunities. So in the last decade or so, companies such as SAP, Hewlett-Packard and J.P. Morgan have started programs designed to recruit neurodivergent talent. And in the time since, they've reported corresponding gains in productivity, morale, innovation and quality. I see this in my own work as well. Again, by the serendipity of working in visual fields without being able to visualize, I wind up working with a lot of minds who are very different than mine. And that results in some weird and wonderful work, such as a film noir animation about fractals that I co-authored that was brought to life by a brilliant, hyper-fantastic animator named Jeremiah Dickey.

13:12Or this is one of my pride and joys. It's a game that's a hybrid jigsaw puzzle and escape room in a box. And the way it works, yeah. The way it works is you first assemble a jigsaw, but you're missing big sections. so you have to unlock them by solving puzzles that are embedded in the illustration and artifacts that you unlock along the way. This was made in collaboration with two incredible artists, Rita Orlov and Senna Tripp, and our minds can be found in very different corners of the galaxy of neurological diversity. So am I working in the wrong fields? No, I don't think so. I think I'm exactly where I should be.

13:52In fact, some of the greatest joy and fulfillment in my life has been from coming to terms with the initially jarring realization that my mind works differently than the people around me and recognizing that for what it is. Dazzling. Thank you.

14:16That was Alex Rosenthal at TED Next 2025. I found this talk a little humbling. Other people don't just think differently. their experience of reality might be built on a totally different cognitive architecture. When you really get that, you stop asking, why don't you see it my way? And start wondering, what does the world feel like on your side? When it comes to understanding things like uber popular wellness trends, that kind of empathy helps break down just how they can be so effective. And to round out our episode, we're sharing a final TED-Ed lesson. This lesson jumps into another fascinating side of perception.

14:57Face pareidolia. That's our tendency to see faces where none actually exist. In a cloud, a window, the hood of a car, even a slice of toast. It sounds silly, right? But it poses a deeper question about who we are. If the brain can create the feeling of recognition before reality fully catches up, What does that tell us about perception itself? Up next, your TED-Ed lesson of the day by Susan Wardle. Imagine opening a bag of chips only to find Santa Claus looking back at you. Or turning the corner to see a smile as wide as a building. Humans see faces in all kinds of mundane objects, but these faces aren't real.

15:42They're illusions due to a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. So why exactly does this happen? And how far can this distortion of reality go? Humans are social animals, and reading faces is an important part of our ability to understand each other. Even a glimpse of someone's face can help you determine if you've met them before, what mood they're in, and if they're paying attention to you. We even use facial features to make snap judgments about a person's potential trustworthiness or aggression. To capture all this vital information, humans have evolved to be very sensitive to face-like structures.

16:19Whenever we see something, our brain immediately starts working to identify the new visual stimuli based on our expectations and prior knowledge. And since faces are so important, humans have evolved several regions of the brain that enable us to identify them faster than other visual stimuli. Whereas recognizing most objects takes our brain around a quarter of a second, we can detect a face in just a tenth of a second. It makes sense that we'd prioritize identifying faces over everything else, but brain imaging studies have revealed that regions may actually be too sensitive, leading them to find faces where they don't exist.

16:58In one study, participants reported seeing illusory faces in over 35 % of pure noise images shown to them, despite the fact that nothing was there. It might seem concerning that our brains can be so wrong so often, but these illusory faces might actually be a byproduct of something evolutionarily advantageous. Since processing all the visual input we encounter quickly and correctly is an enormous computational effort for the brain, this kind of hypersensitivity might act as a useful shortcut. After all, seeing illusory faces is usually harmless, while missing a real face can lead to serious issues.

17:41But for hypersensitivity to be more helpful than harmful, our brains also need to be quick at determining when a face is real and when it isn't. So how fast can our brains tell when they've been duped? To answer this question, researchers used a form of brain imaging known as magnetoencephalography. By measuring the magnetic fields caused by electric currents in the brain, this technique allows us to track changes in brain activity at the scale of milliseconds. With this tool, researchers revealed that the brain generally recognizes a face as illusory within a quarter of a second, around the same time that we can identify most non-face visual stimuli.

18:23However, even after our brain knows the face is fake, we can still see it in the object. And by messing with these brain areas, we can further impact our ability to differentiate between fact from fiction. In one study, researchers stimulated a participant's fusiform face area while they were looking at a non-face object. As a result, the participant reported momentarily seeing facial features despite the object remaining unchanged. And while looking at a real face, stimulation of this same area created perceived distortions of the eyes and nose. These studies suggest that certain features are crucial to face detection.

19:04Just three dots can be enough to represent eyes and a mouth. People will even assign gender, age, and emotion to illusory faces. It's unclear whether a person's culture or individual history impacts these perceptions, but we do know that pareidolia isn't unique to the human experience. Rhesus macaque monkeys show eye movements similar to our own when observing pareidolia-inducing objects and real faces, suggesting that this phenomenon is baked deep into our social primate brains. So next time you see an unexpected face in a coffee, car, or cabinet, remember that it's just your brain working overtime, not to miss the faces that really matter.

19:49This TEDx lesson was directed by Oksana Krumaz, narrated by Alexandra Panzer, and music by André Eris.

20:04The more we accept that what we perceive is shaped by our own minds, subjective, messy, and very human, the more we leave room for humility, for sharper questions, for better evidence, and for one another.

20:27and that's it for today's episode thank you so much for listening ted health is a part of the ted audio collective and i'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode send me a message on instagram at shoshana md this episode was produced by me shoshana ungerleiter and jess shane edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah Degrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Highlash.

21:44We'll see you next time. CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

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