Mid-month, January 2026

Mental Models

Mid-month posts are a series of short essays, largely unrelated to each other and not necessarily related to behavioral economics (the subject of my first-of-the-month posts).

Essay 5: Mental models

The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. -John Milton, poet (9 Dec 1608-1674)

Is there such a thing as an “objective reality”? That’s an interesting question, but it turns out that it is moot because each of us perceives the world in our own way. Neuroscience has increasingly shed light on how the brain works. Here’s a nice summary:

“Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” writes Dr. [Lisa Feldman] Barrett…“It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all of your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs from your body and from the world (called “sense data”), and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.”[1][2]

And each of us processes the firehose of information coming at us in our own way. Hence, each of us has a different view of the world than anyone else. As Morgan Housel puts it, “…you are the only person in the world who thinks the world operates the way you do.” (The Psychology of Money, p. 199).

Neuroactivity takes place at the subconscious level. But we do seem to have some control over our thinking. (I’m going to set aside the debate about whether we have free will.) We can choose, to a degree, how to think about the world. Whether one believes that the glass is half empty or half full is a simple mental model—is the world friendly to me or not?

Because we all have at least a slightly different take on reality, I’m not going to recommend any particular mental models. One hundred nine (yes, 109) of them can be found at:

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

However, I cannot suppress the urge to make a suggestion: Be humble and agnostic about what you think you know. Writing about the scientific method—one mental model—Mark Henderson, former science editor at The Times (of London), comments:

“[Science] is a way of thinking, the best approach devised yet (if still an imperfect one) for discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are… Science is provisional, always open to revision in light of new evidence… And it is comfortable with uncertainty.”[3]

There are several important ideas in this quote. The first of these is the notion that we typically deal with approximations of how things really are, not how things really are. Our senses are bombarded thousands of times per minute with all kinds of information. To avoid being overwhelmed, our minds block out most of the sensory input, so we perceive only a small portion of the available information about reality. Our image of the world is a working model, but not the world itself. That model can be very close to the world itself, or not.

Another idea in Henderson’s quote is that knowledge is provisional and is thus subject to being improved upon at any time. For many years, people thought Newtonian physics was the last word in describing the movement of physical objects. Then quantum physics came along. It turns out that movement at very small scales is not well described by Newton’s equations. Newtonian physics does work as a good approximation at large scales, but it certainly was not the last word.

Because we deal with approximations of reality and because knowledge is provisional, uncertainty is omnipresent. We need to get comfortable with this idea. I’m not saying that you should feel comfortable when dealing with uncertainty, only with the idea that there are very few certainties in life. A realistic attitude about the degree of uncertainty in the world, and therefore our relative impotence at knowing the future, will serve you well in all aspects of your life.

I conclude with three quotes from quite different sources that support the basic argument made here:

1. “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” George Box, statistician. Lovely. I wish I had said that.

2.“Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some just less wrong than others.” The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, p. 123.

3. “The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works.”[4]

References

Housel, Morgan, The Psychology of Money, Harriman House, 2020.

Manson, Mark, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, HarperOne, 2016.

---

[1] https://www.gq.com/story/lisa-feldman-barrett-interview?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

[2] For more detail see

The Bayesian brain

[3] Mark Henderson, “Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science,” in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, ed. John Brockman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012).

[4] https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-buddhism-critic-goes-on-a-silent-buddhist-retreat?utm_source=pocket-newtab