So now you’ve read Inside the Monkeysphere as I asked you to, and are still grappling with its basic message: the fact that our brains only have the inherent capacity to recognize 150 or fewer other people as people. The rest, according to Wong, are “sort of one-dimensional bit characters” to us. What does this mean, besides the slowing dawning realization that you are just a one-dimensional bit character to most of the people you encounter out in the world?

What it means is that your brain has a sort of people-recognizing organ, just like it has a depth perception organ, a color perception organ, a speech recognition organ, and numerous others. It’s what cognitive psychologists call “cognitively impenetrable”: a built-in capacity that confers on you a powerful, immediate, gut-level understanding that is hard to shake even when you know better. It can be wrong, of course; that’s what optical illusions are all about. You know the moon isn’t really larger when it looms on the horizon, but telling yourself that won’t make it stop looking bigger. You can’t talk yourself out of your perceptions, but you can sort of talk over them in your mind.

What this means is that in order to have more real people in your life, you will have to force yourself to see them. You have to do it against your instinct, which is to treat them as mushrooms and turtles in the great Super Mario game of your life.

For better or worse, one of the unique elements of human cognition is the ability to ignore perceptions when it comes to making choices. If you have been assured from a trustworthy source that a transparent bridge is present, even when lighting conditions make it appear absent, you can force yourself to step out onto what appears to be thin air. Of course, you’ll probably be sweating the whole time, or at least the first time. If you had to cross such a bridge several times a day, it would slowly get easier.

Which leaves us with two important lessons: (1) You can make choices to behave contrary to what your perceptions are telling you, and (2) it’s not easy and it takes practice. Good luck, and be careful out there—because most of those other monkeys have not yet read this post.