# Deviate **Beau Lotto** | [[Prediction]]  --- > "What makes the human brain beautiful is that it is delusional." You didn't evolve to see reality. You evolved to survive. And seeing reality accurately isn't a prerequisite for survival—it could even be a barrier to it. This is the foundation of everything Lotto explores: perception isn't about truth, it's about usefulness. All information is inherently meaningless. The light hitting your retina, the sound waves reaching your ears—they're just energy and molecules. Your brain's job is to assign meaning to this noise based on what's been useful before. Only 10 percent of what you "see" comes from your eyes. The other 90 percent comes from the rest of your brain—your history, your assumptions, your ecology. The implication: you're not perceiving the world, you're perceiving your brain's best guess about what the world means. And that guess is shaped entirely by trial and error across three timescales: evolution (long), development (medium), and learning (short). --- ## Core Ideas ### [[The Brain as History]] Your brain is history and little else—a physical manifestation of your past with the capacity to adapt to a new "future past." What you carry forward isn't the actual past, and certainly not an objective one. What you carry are reflexive assumptions manifest in the functional architecture of the brain. These assumptions are deeply physiological. Electrical, in fact. They're not abstract ideas—they're physical things in your brain with their own sort of physical laws. This is the neuroscience of bias. Your assumptions make you *you*. Which means pretty much everything you perceive about your own conscious identity would be on the line if they were ever to be doubted. ### [[Perception as Meaning-Making]] Perception is similar to reading poetry: you're interpreting what it means, because it could mean anything. The meaning of the thing is not the same as the thing itself. At any point in time, your brain is only ever making one decision: to go toward or to go away from something. Living is nothing other than experiencing continual trial and error. Living is empirical. The response cycle—action and reaction, feedback—is at the centre of perception. True knowledge is when information becomes embodied understanding: we have to act in the world to understand it. ### [[Doubt as Generative Force]] Nothing interesting ever happens without active doubt. Yet doubt is often disparaged because it's associated with indecision and weakness. Lotto argues the opposite: to doubt yet do, with humility, is possibly the strongest thing one can do. Doubt is the genesis of powerful, deviating possibilities. It's how the brain sheds constricting assumptions and sees beyond the utility the past has trained it to see. Question your assumptions—especially those that define yourself—and your brain will reward you through the new perceptions this process opens up. --- ## Key Insights **Emotions are proxies for assumptions.** Among other things, emotions are indicators that reveal your assumptions to yourself. When you fail to predict correctly, negative emotions flood your perception. When you're consciously aware of your assumptions going in, even unmet expectations hit less hard—you weren't blind to the forces shaping your perception. **Imagined perception is self-reinforcing.** On a neurocellular level, imagined experiences are physically experienced the same way real ones are. The stories we imagine change us profoundly. This is arguably the point of consciousness: to imagine experiences without the risk of enacting them. > "You must learn to choose your delusions. If you don't, they will choose you." Think positively today and it's statistically more likely you will do the same tomorrow. Through imaging stories, we can create perceptions and alter our future perceptual-based behaviours. **Diversity expands possibility.** Diversity of experience is transformative because new people and environments not only reveal your assumptions to yourself, they expand your space of possibility with new assumptions. If you want to get from A to B in your life, the first challenge is accepting that everything you do is a reflex grounded in assumptions. The next is discovering what those assumptions are—which usually involves people foreign to you. **Uncertainty is the problem the brain evolved to solve.** The drive to mitigate uncertainty underpins much of what we do, feel, see, experience, choose, and love. We even prefer to experience pain over uncertainty. But embracing uncertainty in order to innovate within it is possible—essential, even. Discomfort is a welcome state. **Free will lives in choosing not-A.** Free will requires awareness, humility, and courage within the context of uncertainty. It doesn't live in going to A—it lives in choosing to go to not-A. --- ## Connects To - [[Skin in the Game]] - knowledge through action, not abstraction - [[The Fifth Discipline]] - mental models as filters on reality - [[Thinking in Bets]] - decisions under uncertainty, updating assumptions - [[Everything Is Predictable]] - Bayesian updating as the brain's operating system - [[Antifragile]] - embracing uncertainty as generative rather than threatening --- ## Final Thought The brain is a meaning-making machine running on assumptions you can't see. You don't have access to reality—only your mind's version of it. That's not a bug, it's the design. The permission here is to stop treating doubt as weakness. Doubt, with courage, is the mechanism for seeing differently. And seeing differently is how anything interesting happens.