I’ve just finished The Neuroscience of Tarot, and it left me with more than a few sparks to play with. On the surface, it’s a book about brain science and card reading. But really, it’s a mirror held up to the way we experience the world.
What struck me most was the reminder that perception is never neutral. Every time we meet a person, gaze at a sunrise, or turn over a tarot card, we’re not meeting the thing itself, we’re meeting our own projection of it, shaped by memory and past experience. Neuroscience calls this predictive processing. I call it the brain’s storytelling function.
That insight made me pause. How much of my day-to-day life is filtered through these unconscious narratives? And what happens when I choose to notice them?
For tarot, this shift is profound. Instead of approaching the cards as fixed symbols with rigid meanings, the author encourages you to lean into a more intuitive, experiential approach. The images on the cards became doorways for your own associations, emotions, and stories to step through. The cards don’t “tell you” something external; they reflected the way your mind was already weaving meaning in the moment.
Reading this book has given me a fresh lens, not just for tarot but for living. It reminded me that life itself is a reading: a series of symbols, gestures, and encounters, each inviting me to ask: “What am I really seeing, and what am I projecting?”
That’s a practice worth carrying beyond the page.
You have hit on something that I have not touched previously but see this in my paid work which is about the argument we make and the story we weave around it. On reflection, the argument and story will usually evolve as our perspective is not fixed. The perspective changes when we get other inputs like end user or senior leadership. It is curious in our, or it could be just mine, personal lives we listen to the story but don’t argue with it unless it is at odds with our perspective.