The 6 vs. 9 Trap: Why Perception Really Is Reality

I saw a meme recently of two guys standing on opposite sides of the number 69 painted on the pavement. Before your mind goes straight to the gutter, stay with me...

One guy is looking down and shouting, "It’s a 6, you idiot!"

The other is standing on the opposite side, looking down, shouting back, "Are you blind? It’s a 9!"

If you’ve ever been in a pissin' match with a partner over who "actually" said what, or watched a dispute where two well-meaning people recount the exact same holiday dinner with entirely opposite emotional realities, you know this meme hits a little too close to home.

Working in forensics and family law teaches you this truth pretty quickly: unless there is a cold, hard paper trail of indisputable evidence, people get permanently stuck in the 6 vs. 9. Who am I kidding, even WITH a paper trail of indisputable evidence, people will dig their feet in.

We write it off as stubbornness, bias, or gaslighting. Now I know many of you are saying, “that seems like a good excuse for my ex who legitimately is crazy and their brain just doesn't work right.”

But recent breakthroughs in neuroscience suggest something wilder. That argument isn't just a disagreement about an opinion—it's a fundamental mismatch in how two brains are manufacturing reality.

Turns out they have—according to me.

... The Not-So Science Fiction of "Mind Reading"

For a long time, the idea that someone could look inside your mind and figure out what you are thinking belonged strictly to movies like The Matrix. But between 2008 and 2011, Jack Gallant’s lab at UC Berkeley published a series of papers that felt like pure sci-fi.

While human subjects sat inside an MRI scanner looking at natural images and movies, Gallant’s team measured the activity of their visual cortex. Using that brain data, they built decoders that could actually identify what image a person was looking at—and eventually, reconstruct blurry, ghostlike approximations of the movies playing in real-time in the subject's head.

The technology didn’t stall out there. In 2023, Alex Huth and his team at UC Berkeley reported a semantic decoder that could reconstruct the gist of continuous language from fMRI data. Subjects spent hours listening to stories in a scanner, mapping out how their brains handled meaning. Once trained, the decoder could listen to a brand-new story and generate text capturing much of its meaning straight from brain activity alone.

Then came 2025, when Tang and Huth demonstrated that these semantic decoders could be partially transferred between different people by functionally aligning their brain responses.

Looking at this rapid progression, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype.

Not so fast, phew.

The central dogma of biology is that DNA gets transcribed into messenger RNA and translated into proteins via codons (triplets of nucleotides). Thanks to decades of foundational work, we have a literal "Rosetta Stone" for genetics. Scientists mapped the exact symbols and machinery, along with the “light switch” that turns certain gene expressions on and off.

Because of this, we can take a human gene, synthesize it, put it into a bacterium (an organism separated from us by billions of years of evolution), and watch the bacterium execute the instructions perfectly to produce human insulin. That is true code-cracking.

Now, imagine an alternate history of biology where scientists never figured out triplets, codons, or ribosomes. Instead, they just collected massive amounts of data and trained giant AI models to guess what a gene does based on its shape (hmmm, Pattern Breakers, anyone?).

You see, AI might have great tools for identifying patterns, but it doesn’t have the key to unlock the way we perceive the codes…

Good news for therapists: that means we still have a job playing marital referee (for now).

Neuroscience is stuck in that exact same alternate universe. Our current brain-reading computers are mathematical marvels that show a link between brain activity and the outside world. But just because an MRI computer can guess what you're looking at doesn't mean we actually understand how that individual perceives it.

P.S. I recently had an MRI, and it reminded me, I grandly dislike MRI's and I'm very good at meditating, I can count clanks and whizzes with the best of them.

This brings us back to our favorite clichés: Perception is reality. The truth is in the eye of the beholder.

In the physical world, a photon hits your retina, or a sound wave vibrates your eardrum. But what happens next isn't a passive recording. Recent work on the geometry of neural populations (such as Bernardi and colleagues' research on "abstract representations" and cross-condition generalization) shows how the brain organizes information into complex, multidimensional spaces.

The catch? Meaning is relational.

In genetics, a message is portable because the message and the cellular interpreter are separate components. But in the brain, a pattern of electrical spikes doesn't carry an intrinsic, universal meaning sitting there waiting to be read.

Instead, the same exact pattern of upstream neural activity might result in completely different perceptions or actions depending entirely on which downstream circuit is reading it, how its synapses are weighted, and what kind of context it is embedded in.

In a very literal sense, the code doesn't reside in the sender alone. It lives entirely in the mapping between the sender and the receiver.

What looks like an obvious act of malice to one person in a relationship argument might be processed entirely differently by another person's neural architecture, shaped by a lifetime of unique trauma, defense mechanisms, and context. Your perception isn't a mirror reflecting an objective reality out there; it's a private, highly customized translation generated by your brain's internal circuitry.

They aren't necessarily lying when they look at the 6 and see a 9. Their brain's machinery is genuinely reading a 9.

And here's the real kicker - how YOU perceive something now, can be entirely different if the situation played out a whopping 5 minutes later, depending on whatever OTHER data your brain was processing at the time.

Five minutes from now, your brain might process a neutral comment as an attack simply because your blood sugar dipped, you got a stressful text, your nervous system drifted into a subtle fight-or-flight loop, or your working memory is loaded down with something else.

The brain is never static. It is a constantly shifting dynamical system. The "lens" through which you view reality updates continuously based on what your brain was just processing milliseconds ago.

So, where does this leave us, like seriously Dr. Michaela, why did you waste :15 minutes of my life having me read this?

Well… simply this - every time you find yourself stuck in a 6-versus-9 argument—whether it's across a courtroom table in family law or across the kitchen island with someone you love—remember that you aren't just dealing with stubbornness. You are witnessing the raw, unadulterated reality of biology. We are all walking around inside our own private universes, translated through our own unique neural wiring—living proof that perception is reality, and the truth really is in the eye of the beholder.

So agree to disagree with the idiot already, clearly, they’re wrong.

But obvi whether you agree with me or not- you need my new book: https://amzn.to/4dp83lD