Neurotypica

Have you ever noticed how two people can look at the same situation and see completely different things? One person sees a struggling entrepreneur; another sees a tax cheat. One sees a freedom fighter; another sees a terrorist. Or how you can be absolutely certain you're being objective about something, only to realise years later that you were seeing it through a very particular lens?

That's not a bug in your thinking---it's how brains work. The brain doesn't passively receive an objective reality and occasionally distort it. The brain actively constructs reality by mapping perceptions to possible actions, and that mapping is always selective. You perceive what matters to you---what has purpose, what affords action, what connects to your goals and constraints. Everything else fades into the background. This selective mapping is what we call a frame, and frames are ideologies.

Ideology usually sounds sinister---a distortion that obscures the truth. But the brain can only ever produce ideologies. You can't perceive the world 'as it is'; you can only perceive it through the mappings your brain has learned. A bird with four-dimensional colour vision lives in a different perceptual world than you do. The 'truth' of colour depends on what kind of eyes you have. Similarly, the 'truth' of a situation depends on what matters to you---what actions it affords, what goals it serves, what patterns you've learned to recognise.

This isn't just about vision or abstract concepts. It applies to everything: knowledge, beliefs, aesthetic judgements, cultural norms. What you call a 'fact' is just a particularly stable and widely shared frame---one that's proven useful across many contexts and many people. But it's still a frame. It still highlights some relationships and ignores others. A fishpond is water when you want to swim, but concrete when you need to repair it. The boundaries we draw around things---what counts as the 'thing' and what doesn't---shift with purpose.

So what can you do? First, recognise that you're always operating within a frame, and that frame shapes what you perceive and what actions seem possible. When you're stuck or when conflict arises, ask: what frame am I using? What is this frame making visible, and what is it hiding? Second, treat frames as tools you can choose, not truths you must defend. Some frames are better than others for a given purpose, but no frame captures everything. Third, pay attention to aesthetics. Style, form, and beauty aren't superficial decorations---they're high-bandwidth signals that shape your frames directly, often faster and more powerfully than propositional arguments. What 'feels right' is often a better predictor of behaviour than what you'd argue is logically correct.

The point isn't to escape ideology---you can't. The point is to recognise that you're choosing between frames, not between truth and distortion. Choose the frames that serve your purposes, update them when they stop working, and stay curious about what they're leaving out.

Let's look at the neural architecture that helps us understand this heuristic better.