BRAIN AND INVENTED REALITY: How the Brain Distinguishes the Real from the Artificial (or not)
- Marcela Emilia Silva do Valle Pereira Ma Emilia
- Nov 10
- 5 min read
🌐 Brain and Invented Reality
We live in the era of overlapping realities.
Between what is seen, what is edited, and what is invented, the human brain is being forced to do something it was never designed for: to distinguish the real from the artificial.
After all, the brain wasn’t born for deepfakes, AI filters, or mixed realities.
It was born to interpret the physical world — light, sound, touch — and now it must deal with digitally manufactured “truths” that activate the same neural networks as the real world.
Neuroscience is showing that separating the false from the convincing isn’t easy.
And that, in practice, the mind doesn’t seek truth — it seeks coherence.
🧠 When the brain believes a lie
Perception is a construction, not a mirror of reality.
Our brain combines what it sees with what it expects to see — and that’s what neuroscience calls predictive cognition.
Researchers such as Anil Seth (University of Sussex) and Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern University) argue that the mind is constantly “hallucinating in a controlled way” — in other words, creating an internal reality that merely adjusts to the sensory data available.
That’s why, when we see a “realistic” image, video, or post, the brain tends to accept what confirms its mental models.
👉 If it looks coherent, it’s treated as true.
And this has already been proven in the lab:
A Euronews (2023) study showed that deepfake videos created false memories in 50% of participants, who began recalling non-existent film scenes as if they had actually watched them.
🔗 Deepfake videos create false memories in 50% of people — Euronews, 2023
Another experiment published in iScience (2021) revealed a striking paradox:even without being able to detect deepfakes accurately, people believe they can — a bias of overconfidence that deceives the brain itself.
🔗 People can’t detect deepfakes, but think they can — iScience, 2021
eScholarship (2023) research showed that deepfakes not only fool the observer — they implant lasting false memories in adults.
🔗 Deepfakes implant false memories in adults — eScholarship, 2023
In short: the brain doesn’t need truth — it needs emotional coherence.
And when emotion and image coincide, the brain records it as real.
🧩 The brain edits the past: why we remember what suits us
The brain isn’t a recorder — it’s a storyteller.
Every memory we hold isn’t the event itself, but the latest version the brain has reconstructed of it.
When something happens, the hippocampus fragments that experience into pieces — sound, smell, image, emotion — and distributes them across different brain regions (hippocampus, amygdala, temporal and parietal cortices, etc.).
Later, when trying to recall, the brain reconnects those fragments — one of the most fascinating phenomena in the neuroscience of memory: mnemonic reconstruction.
But not all fragments return.
And what’s missing, imagination fills in.
This process is unconscious, automatic, and deeply human: the brain fills in the gaps of memory with what makes sense for our current self.
We don’t remember what happened — we remember what suits our identity.
Neuroscientist Martin Conway (2015), from the City University of London, describes this as adaptive autobiographical memory:
“We remember what sustains who we are.”
And science confirms it. A meta-analysis published in Memory, Mind and Media (Cambridge, 2023) showed that false memories are created based on the meaning the brain assigns to the world — not on facts.
This explains why two people can remember the same event in completely different ways — not because they lie, but because they reconstruct.
🪞Memory is an adaptive narrative.
And each time we access it, it changes a little — like a page rewritten over the past that best confirms the present.
📱 The neuroscience of digital illusions
Deepfakes, recommendation algorithms and hyper-realistic content exploit the same mechanism that keeps the brain “running on autopilot.”
The brain loves predictable patterns and fast rewards — dopamine, emotional reinforcement, confirmation of beliefs.
Neuroimaging studies show that when consuming false yet emotionally consistent content, the amygdala is activated before the anterior cingulate cortex, temporarily blocking critical thinking.
It’s literally a cognitive trap built by biology itself.
And the longer we stay in this loop, the more the brain adapts:
· Less sensitivity to contradictory information.
· More trust in familiar sources (even if wrong).
· Lower prefrontal cortex activity during rapid decisions.
In other words: the mind trained for infinite scroll unlearns how to doubt.
🧩 Practical applications: how to protect the brain from misinformation
The good news is that the brain can be reprogrammed — and applied neuroscience shows how.
🧘 1. Create cognitive pauses.
Before reacting emotionally, breathe. Literally.
Three deep breaths reduce amygdala activity and reactivate the prefrontal cortex.
🧭 2. Practise healthy doubt.
Don’t confuse scepticism with cynicism.
Questioning information activates metacognitive networks — the brain learns to observe its own thinking.
🌐 3. Diversify your sources of information.
Exposure to opposing perspectives increases connectivity between the hippocampus (memory) and the prefrontal cortex (reason).
This reduces confirmation bias — the mechanism that makes us believe only what reinforces what we already think.
💡 4. Train the brain to check, not react.
Disinformation depends on emotional urgency.
Truthful information depends on cognitive calm.
🏢 In the corporate environment:
Forward-thinking organisations are promoting cognitive training in attention and critical analysis based on neuroscience.
This improves decision-making quality, reduces biases, and strengthens organisational trust.
🔬 The neuroscience of truth
The brain is a biological simulator.
It creates, compares, predicts, and edits reality constantly.
And this flexibility — known as perceptual neuroplasticity — is both what makes us creative and what makes us vulnerable to illusion.
Research from the MIT Media Lab and the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab shows that the brain reacts with the same autonomic responses to a convincing fake video as it does to a real experience.
For the nervous system, seeing and living can easily blur.
The solution isn’t to distrust everything.
It’s to relearn how to perceive consciously.
🌱 Conclusion — The mind as the last frontier of truth
In the end, truth is not information — it’s a neural construction sustained by intention.
Using neuroscience to understand how the brain creates and confuses realities is the first step towards an era of cognitive consciousness — where truth doesn’t depend on an algorithm, but on attention.
✨ The future isn’t the brain that believes everything.
It’s the brain that chooses what to believe.
Each memory is also a prediction — and the brain, ultimately, rewrites the past so that it continues to fit the present.
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