Deviate

How can you truly see the world as it is, instead of how your mind tells you it is? In Deviate, neuroscientist Beau Lotto argues that we don’t actually perceive reality—we perceive our brain’s best guess, shaped by the long history of what has helped our species survive. Our vision, our judgments, even our sense of right and wrong are not objective truths but deeply personal meanings created through experience. Lotto contends that this isn’t a flaw—it’s the foundation of creativity and innovation. To live fully and think creatively, we must learn to see our own seeing, to understand how perception works so we can shape it intentionally.

The Brain’s Illusion of Reality

At the heart of Lotto’s exploration is a radical insight: perception evolved not for truth but for usefulness. The brain filters and interprets ambiguous sensory information in order to help us survive, not to provide a perfect mirror of objective reality. Light, sound, touch—all are meaningless until the brain contextualizes them through a lifetime of trial and error. A famous example that Lotto uses is the viral image known as “The Dress.” Half the world saw it as white and gold, and the other half as black and blue. The image itself didn’t change—but people’s perceptual histories, their experiences of light and color, led them to interpret it differently. This simple phenomenon exposes a profound truth about human experience: we never see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

Evolution’s Design for Uncertainty

Why would our brains evolve this way? Lotto traces the answer back to our prehistoric ancestors and the dangerous uncertainty of their environments. Survival depended not on seeing perfectly, but on predicting outcomes that reduced risk. The fear of uncertainty—the primal terror of the dark, for instance—shaped our biology and our culture. Every society, he notes, builds institutions to create certainty: religions, laws, schools, governments. Yet these same mechanisms that comfort us also inhibit creativity by locking us inside patterns of assumption. The paradox is that the human brain evolved both to avoid uncertainty and to thrive within it. To innovate, we must do what evolution taught us to fear: step into the dark.

Doubt as a Catalyst for Creativity

Throughout the book, Lotto expands doubt from mere skepticism into a creative tool. To doubt isn’t to despair—it’s to celebrate the space of uncertainty where new possibilities emerge. His concept of “going from A to not-A” captures this transformation: stopping our habitual way of seeing (A) opens space for something new to arise (B, C, or Z). True creativity, he argues, begins not with answers but with questions—especially with the question why. History’s breakthroughs—from the decoding of the Rosetta Stone to Steve Jobs’s invention of the iPhone—stemmed from questioning assumptions others accepted as immutable facts. To deviate from the norm, you must see that what feels like reality is only your brain’s current story.

The Ecology of Perception

Lotto presents perception as an ecological process: everything interacts with everything else. Your brain, body, and environment form an inseparable system. You don’t simply perceive; you co-create the world with others through shared and conflicting assumptions. In this sense, to change how you see is also to change how culture evolves. Because perception is social, the most effective innovations emerge from diverse groups that challenge each other’s certainties—his “Lab of Misfits” was built on precisely that principle. By constructing environments that reward curiosity rather than conformity, we can reengineer the very system that limits vision.

Why This Matters

Why does all this matter to you? Because everything—your relationships, your work, your beliefs—rests on perception. Understanding that your view of reality is subjective doesn’t make the world less real; it makes you freer to interact with it consciously. Lotto’s challenge is both scientific and moral: embrace uncertainty, question assumptions, and create an “ecology of innovation” in your life that allows doubt to become possibility. The goal isn’t to see the truth but to know why you see what you do—and to use that understanding to see differently. In other words, to deviate.

Lotto begins with a deceptively simple claim: all the information your senses gather is meaningless until your brain interprets it. The photons that strike your eyes, the vibrations your ears detect, the molecules that touch your skin—none come with built-in meaning. They are only raw data until your brain assigns usefulness based on what helped you survive in the past. This is the reason we experience perception as reality when, in fact, it is an evolved story of survival.

Seeing the Brain’s Hidden Filters

Each perception arises from the brain’s recursive network, a loop that links past experiences to present stimuli. You think you see a color or hear a sound, but you’re actually reusing old interpretations. Consider Chevreul’s discovery at the Gobelins tapestry factory in 19th-century France. Customers complained that fabrics changed color after purchase. The problem wasn’t the dye—it was context. Colors shift depending on neighboring hues, revealing that perception is relational, not absolute. Lotto places this insight at the foundation of his argument: our minds don’t mirror the world; they construct a useful version of it.

From The Dress to The Frog

In modern times, The Dress phenomenon showed the same principle on a global scale: people saw different colors because their brains corrected for lighting differently. Lotto’s playful metaphor of the frog on a smartphone emphasizes how deeply these corrections run. The frog keeps snapping at digital ants, convinced they’re real food. It behaves perfectly rationally according to its perceptual history—yet its reality is an illusion. We are that frog more often than we realize, responding automatically to patterns that once proved useful but may now mislead us.

Pain, Language, and Delusion

To make perception tangible, Lotto uses pain as an example. Pain isn’t located in your arm or toe—it occurs entirely in your brain. Nerve signals only provide data; your brain gives them meaning as injury, demanding a defensive response. Likewise, you read fragmented words—“ca y u rea t is”—not as nonsense but as “Can you read this?” because experience has taught your brain the patterns of English. These examples prove that perception is a biological act of delusion. Your brain invents coherence so you can act quickly. Rather than pitying our illusions, Lotto celebrates them as creative tools: they allow imagination to shape lived reality.

Embracing Meaning over Accuracy

The surprising conclusion: accuracy doesn’t matter; usefulness does. You could never see reality exactly because your senses evolve within ecological constraints, like bees perceiving ultraviolet to find flowers. What matters is how perception enables you to respond effectively. The more you interact and experiment, the richer your perceptual history becomes—the more complex and adaptable your brain’s story of the world. Creativity, then, starts where you replace the desire for truth with curiosity about meaning.

From childhood nightmares to adult anxiety, darkness has always symbolized fear. Lotto explains that our dread of uncertainty has deep evolutionary roots: early humans who minimized unpredictable situations survived better. The dark concealed predators and hidden dangers, making exploration risky. Yet this same principle created a paradox—our species evolved intelligence and adaptability precisely because a few dared to step into the unknown.

Evolution’s Logic: Certainty Equals Survival

Two million years ago in East Africa, survival meant predicting where water and food could be found and avoiding threats. Those unable to forecast outcomes perished. The result is a brain wired to seek certainty relentlessly. Our psychological need for control—the desire to press the “UP” button even when it changes nothing, as in the Heathrow lift anecdote—soothes that primal anxiety. When people feel agency, even illusory agency, stress decreases dramatically.

Anger: The Illusion of Control

Lotto delves into a fascinating neurological response: when uncertainty arises, the brain often defaults to anger because anger offers an illusion of certainty. Physiologically, catecholamines flood the bloodstream, attention narrows, and conviction rises. The furious traveler yelling at a gate agent isn’t just impatient—they’re reclaiming agency in a chaotic system. Ironically, intelligent people may be even better at constructing justifications for their anger, making them less likely to escape the trap of false certainty.

Why We Prefer Pain to Uncertainty

Studies at University College London reveal a startling truth: not knowing whether you’ll receive an electric shock is more stressful than knowing for sure. Humans prefer predictable pain to unpredictable outcomes. It’s why many stay in toxic relationships—like the women photographer Donna Ferrato documented—choosing the devil they know over the uncertainty of freedom. Governments and marketers exploit this bias; Uber’s live-map feature works less by innovation than by relieving anxiety about when your ride will come.

Celebrating Doubt

To deviate creatively, we must reverse evolution’s instinct. Lotto invites you to “celebrate doubt”—to see uncertainty as the birthplace of discovery rather than danger. Fear of not-knowing isn’t weakness; it’s a natural threshold. The courage to stand in the dark, observe, and listen differently transforms uncertainty into insight. Whether in relationships, politics, or art, progress emerges when someone refuses the comfort of false clarity. As Lotto puts it, adaptability—not safety—determines survival.

One of Lotto’s most practical ideas is that your first perception is rarely your best one. When someone bumps into you and your reflex is irritation, stop—don’t go to “A.” Instead, pause in “not-A,” the space of uncertainty before reaction. In that pause lies the ability to choose differently. This is the moment where creativity and free will are born.

Stopping as Transformation

Just stopping triggers measurable changes in the brain. Lotto compares this to meditation: halting automatic meaning-making releases oxytocin instead of cortisol, promoting empathy and openness. The famous psychotherapist Carl Jung said, “Problems are never fixed; we only change our perspective on them.” Lotto’s neurological version of this wisdom turns perception itself into therapy. By learning to look away—to redirect attention from the ‘obvious’—you widen your mental space of possibility.

Attention and Looking Away

A story about Lotto’s infant son illustrates how deeply attention governs perception. The child cried when his gaze fixated on a toy he couldn’t reach. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. Only when Lotto removed the toy did calm return. Our brains, too, get trapped in reflexive loops of attention—the adult version of that frustrated baby. Looking away activates the frontal cortex, the part that enables deliberate inhibition, the foundation of conscious choice.

The Power of Practice

Like any muscle, perception strengthens through repetition. Each time you stop your knee-jerk interpretation, you erode an old neural pathway and create a new one. The process feels uncomfortable because you’re entering uncertainty—the brain’s least favorite state—but each pause expands your future possibilities. Over time, not-A becomes more accessible, allowing you to see the same person, idea, or event differently. Meditation, curiosity, and creative listening all train this capacity.

Free Will in Re-Meaning

What Lotto calls “changing the future past” happens in not-A. By reinterpreting the meanings you’ve assigned to old experiences, you rewrite your perceptual history. The next time similar stimuli arise, your brain responds differently. Free will doesn’t live in the present reaction—it lives in the ability to reshape what that reaction will be next time. Awareness, humility, and courage turn mechanical behavior into creative agency.

Toward the end of Deviate, Lotto expands his ideas from the personal to the collective. Creativity isn’t just an individual attribute—it’s ecological. The most adaptive systems, biological or social, balance two forces: creativity and efficiency. He calls this balance the ecology of innovation, and it defines successful evolution, thriving organizations, and fulfilling relationships.

Learning from Nature’s Design

Robert Full’s Poly-PEDAL Lab at UC Berkeley exemplifies this principle. By studying cockroaches and geckos, Full’s team discovered biological solutions that inspired robotics. Their breakthroughs came through playful questioning—scientific curiosity freed from hierarchy. Play, Lotto writes, celebrates uncertainty because it values process over outcome. Evolution itself works this way: it experiments, fails, adapts, and repeats. Systems that complexify and then refine—like Apple’s iterative design process or the human brain’s cycles of growth and pruning—are the ones that innovate sustainably.

Balancing Creativity and Efficiency

Innovation requires oscillation between freedom and constraint. Too much efficiency kills exploration; too much creativity erodes focus. Lotto contrasts the redundancy of a bird’s cerebellum (robust and adaptable) with the brittle precision of an airplane’s control system (efficient but fragile). The same logic applies to organizations and people: flexibility ensures survival. The most resilient leaders create environments where play and intention coexist, where asking “why?” is as valued as delivering results.

Play with Intention

For Lotto, science itself is “play with intention”—structured curiosity. His Lab of Misfits conducted experiments in everyday settings, turning social gatherings into laboratories of perception. In one study, participants unconsciously grouped themselves by power states after simple writing prompts. The result demonstrated how invisible assumptions shape behavior. By making environments safe for exploration, leaders and learners uncover these hidden biases and invent new ways of seeing.

Creating Your Own Ecology

In your own life, an ecology of innovation means alternating between expansion and consolidation—trying new things, then refining. Surround yourself with diversity, allow mistakes, and create spaces that provoke curiosity. As Lotto notes, “to lead others into darkness” is the essence of leadership: enabling people to explore uncertainty safely. Whether at home or work, cultivating this dynamic balance turns survival into thriving—and perception into creation.