That’s Weird! The Brain’s War on Different
Every so often, I do a thought experiment that works better in slides than in writing. Mostly because the reaction is instant—the laughter, the confusion, the disgust. But let’s try it here.
First, imagine a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, followed by an ice-cream cone for dessert.
Would you eat that?
Of course you would.
Now picture an ice-cream cone filled with spaghetti and meatballs, beside a plate of ice cream and a slice of garlic bread.
Would you eat that?
Most people recoil.
They grimace. They shake their heads. They say it’s gross.
And yet, from a nutritional and digestive standpoint, the two meals are identical. Same ingredients. Same sequence.
So what’s the difference?
It’s weird.
And that’s the thing about our brains. They don’t like weird. They’re built to seek recognizable patterns, to conserve energy, to fill in blanks using what they already know. Predictability is efficient. Novelty is expensive. Weird, therefore, feels dangerous.
That instinct once kept us alive. But today, it does something else.
It makes us suspicious of anything that doesn’t look familiar.
It’s why some people practically hyperventilate at the sight of a rainbow flag.
Why legislators push aside all other business to debate bathrooms and pronouns for a group that makes up a fraction of one percent of the population.
Why a kid with a purple mohawk and black lipstick gets side-eyed in a coffee shop for the crime of self-expression.
Why someone with autism or in a wheelchair still draws stares as if their conditions were contagious.
It’s why I’ve had to quietly push my own internal STFU button on airplanes when someone mumbles to another passenger, “Take the goddamn mask off.”
Weird, to them, means wrong.
But here’s the irony: you can’t be curious about some things and closed-minded about others.
The brain’s reluctance doesn’t work that way. It’s a global setting.
If you train it to reject what it doesn’t recognize, it will do that everywhere—in your politics, in your workplace, in your relationships, in your ideas.
That’s why you won’t eat spaghetti from an ice-cream cone.
It’s why you resist learning a new system, trying a new tool, or doing something in a way that feels unfamiliar.
Your brain isn’t protecting your taste. It’s protecting your patterns.
The world is only going to get weirder.
Technology will bend what we think of as normal. Culture will keep redrawing its boundaries. People will keep showing up in ways that challenge our assumptions.
So practice being curious and open to novelty.
Because the next decade will belong to those who can look at the unfamiliar, and instead of flinching, lean closer with wonder.
And if you ever doubt that, make yourself a spaghetti-and-meatballs sundae.
Then see which part of you wins. The critic or the risk-taker.
Only one will serve you well.