Your Brain Is Lying to You : How Cognitive Biases and Perception Errors Shape Everything You Believe

What if the world you experience is not a direct reflection of reality, but a construction created by your own brain? Your Brain Is Lying to You explores a central finding of modern neuroscience and cognitive science: the human mind did not evolve to perceive the world accurately. It evolved to survive. As a result, perception, memory, attention, and reasoning are shaped by predictions, shortcuts, and biases that quietly distort reality often without our awareness. This book examines how the brain builds experience rather than recording it. You will learn why perception is a process of prediction, why memory is reconstructed rather than retrieved, and why attention filters out most of the world before it ever reaches consciousness. From there, the book explores cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, the Dunning–Kruger effect, availability heuristics, anchoring, sunk costs, and hindsight bias, showing why even intelligent people routinely reach flawed conclusions. Moving beyond the individual mind, Your Brain Is Lying to You shows how these distortions intensify in everyday life. Romantic love alters perception at a neurological level. Media ecosystems exploit threat detection and outrage. Social media algorithms amplify extremes and distort social reality. Political beliefs activate identity systems that override analytical reasoning. Across domains, confidence often exceeds evidence, and disagreement reflects genuinely different perceived realities rather than simple ignorance. This is not a self-help book. It does not promise to fix your thinking, eliminate bias, or rewire your brain. Awareness alone does not grant immunity, and this book does not pretend otherwise. Instead, it offers understanding: how cognition actually works, why bias is normal, and why certainty is often a feeling rather than a fact. Grounded in peer-reviewed research and written for general readers, Your Brain Is Lying to You invites a more honest relationship with your own mind one rooted not in perfection, but in intellectual humility. Your brain is still lying to you. Understanding that reality changes how you relate to everything you believe.