Bring Curiosity (Not Conflict) to Your Holiday Dinner Table

Tomorrow, a lot of us will sit down at tables with the people we love… and quietly brace ourselves for what might come out of their mouths.

We’re bracing, not because we don’t care about them, but because we know how quickly a conversation can turn from “can you pass the stuffing?” to “how the hell can you possibly belive that?”

There have been plenty of holidays where I’ve walked away from the table feeling more alone than when I arrived, and more convinced that the distance between me and the people I care about is quietly widening.

After enough of those moments, I found myself wondering if there was a different way to show up this year.

Not to win arguments.

Not to “fix” anyone.

But to stay connected in rooms where disconnection felt inevitable.

That question is what led me to launch Defining Sonder and host our first workshop called Rewired for Connection.

Below is a shortened overview of some of the tools we explored in the workshop.

My hope is that as we enter another holiday season - one full of tension, tenderness, and the fragile hope of togetherness - you’ll carry even one of these ideas with you.

And maybe it will help you feel a little more connected than you have in the past few years.

What this is really about

This isn’t a post about being nicer or agreeing more.

It’s about understanding something deeper:

We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

Anaïs Nin

Most conflict and distance in our relationships doesn’t come from evil intentions or bad hearts. It comes from misperception. From the invisible machinery of the brain quietly shaping what we see, what we assume, and how we react.

So here’s the arc of this blog:

First: your brain is a prediction engine, not a camera.

Second: your “training data” shapes the way you perceive the world.

Third: curiosity is the skill that can build bridges across any divide.

Let’s start where most misunderstanding actually begins - with the many illusions happening inside our own minds.

Your brain isn’t showing you reality. It’s showing you a story.

We like to imagine ourselves as clear-eyed observers of the world: rational, grounded, seeing things as they are.

Neuroscience is less flattering.

We’re drowning in information, so the brain starts guessing

Every second, your brain is hit with an estimated 11 million bits of information, including sounds, sights, smells, textures, micro-expressions, and emotional cues.

Out of all of that, your conscious awareness can only handle about 40.

That gap between 11,000,000 and 40 is where your brain gets busy.

To keep you alive, your brain doesn’t wait for perfect information. It predicts. It uses your past experiences, fears, beliefs, and cultural scripts to guess what’s happening right now and fills in the missing pieces.

So tomorrow at the dinner table, just remember that no one is seeing the world objectively as it is. Everyone is seeing the world as their mind expects it to be.

Your eyes are not cameras

We talk about “seeing” as if our eyes are little cameras faithfully capturing the world.

They’re not.

Your eyes send incomplete, noisy data to your brain. Your brain then stitches together a smooth picture from fragments consisting of light, shadows, familiar shapes, and remembered past patterns.

It’s less “photographing reality” and more “auto-completing based on best guess.”

This process, called predictive processing, is your brain saying, “I’ve seen something like this before, therefore I can fill in the rest.”

Take these examples:

In those first two examples, your brain didn’t actually read what was on the screen - it filled in what it expected to be there. Your mind recognized the general shape of the words and auto-corrected them based on every word it’s ever seen before.

And in the third image, your brain did the same thing with faces. You saw something that looked totally normal because your past experiences told you, “Yes, this is how a face should be arranged.”

Flip the picture upside down, and suddenly you notice how wrong your brain’s first impression was.

This is the pattern:

• You’re never just seeing what’s in front of you.

• You’re seeing your reality through the lens of every stored memory, pattern, and assumption your brain has collected over a lifetime.

These illusions are harmless.

But the same mental shortcuts play out in far more meaningful parts of our lives.

Bias isn’t a character flaw. It’s the default setting of perception.

Here’s a riddle I use in the workshop to attempt to show how, when our brains fill in the gaps, it can lead to bias and stereotypes:

A father and son are in a car accident.

The father dies instantly.

The son is rushed to the hospital.

The surgeon walks in and says,

“I can’t operate. This is my son.”

Who is the surgeon?

If you didn’t immediately think “his mother,” you’re not alone.

It’s not necessarily because you’re sexist. It’s because your brain ran a prediction based on the patterns it has seen most often: surgeons = men. That pattern fired faster than your conscious values.

This is the Bayesian brain at work: constantly asking, “Given everything I’ve seen before, what’s most likely happening now?”

As I mentioned above, it’s efficient and useful for our survival, but in social situations, it can be devastating when we are certain our predictions are true.

Your inner “training data” shapes how you see people.

If your brain is constantly predicting, the next question matters a lot:

• What data is it predicting from?

We are walking training sets

Modern AI models learn from their training data.

Feed an algorithm ten years of résumés from mostly men, and it learns that male-coded language = “good candidate.” That’s exactly what happened in a well-publicized Amazon experiment: the system began downgrading résumés with the word “women” and penalizing women’s colleges.

The model wasn’t “evil.”

It was just reflecting the data it had been given. 

Our brains work similarly.

Our “training data” includes:

• the family we grew up in

• the neighborhood we lived in

• the stories we heard

• the media we consume

• the people most “like us”

• the people we’ve been taught to fear or dismiss

• what our social media feeds reinforce

The problem is that we're all now walking into Thanksgiving and mistaking our training data for truth. We treat our limited set of experiences as if they represent everyone.

SOS: Sorting, Othering, Siloing

In I Never Thought of It That Way, Monica Guzmán names three forces that quietly narrow our worlds:

• Sorting – clustering with people like us

• Othering – turning “those people” into something fundamentally different

• Siloing – surrounding ourselves only with information that confirms what we already think

Social media supercharges all three. Algorithms are designed to keep us engaged, which often means feeding us more of what makes us feel right and less of what challenges us.

Over time, our sense of “how the world works” becomes narrower, louder, and more certain.

So when your cousin says something that feels shocking to you, part of what you’re feeling is the collision of two different information ecosystems. Two sets of training data that are slamming into each other.

You’re not just disagreeing about a topic. You’re literally coming from two different informational worlds.

Humans hallucinate too

When an AI model doesn’t have enough information, it confidently invents things. We call this a hallucination.

We do that, too.

When we don’t know why someone believes what they do, or why they snapped, or why they withdrew, we confidently fill in the blanks with:

• “They don’t care.”

• “They’re selfish.”

• “They’re brainwashed.”

• “They’re just like they’ve always been.”

We hallucinate meaning from our training data and then react to that hallucination. 

If our brains work like this (fast, confident, and sometimes wrong), then we need a tool that slows the process down and helps us actually see each other.

Curiosity is the skill that changes the conversation.

Once you see how the brain works and how narrow our training data can be, it’s easy to feel discouraged - like, “Great, so I’m biased, they’re biased, and the world is on fire. Now what?”

But this is where the door opens.

There is one skill that can interrupt autopilot, expand your training data in real time, and rebuild connection even across strong disagreement:

Curiosity.

I’m not talking performative curiosity, and not cross-examination in disguise.

The kind of curiosity that genuinely wants to know: “How did you come to see the world that way?”

We are born question-askers. Then we stop.

Dr. Michelle Dickinson, PhD, shared a statistic that made me quite sad:

• At 3 years old, children ask about 107 questions per hour.

• By 6, it drops to 2.5 questions per hour.

• By 11, it’s effectively zero.

At some point, we stop asking “But why?”

We've stopped asking meaningful questions like this because, over time, we learned that: 

• questions make you vulnerable

• certainty earns approval

• disagreement is dangerous

• and curiosity slows down conversations that adults want sped up

So we often carry that diminishing curiosity into adulthood… especially into charged spaces like holiday tables.

But when curiosity disappears, our predictions go unchecked. Our assumptions harden. Our relationships take the hit.

My goal this holiday season (and hopefully yours too), is to ask more questions.

Questions like:

• “What happened that made this matter so much to you?”

• “When did you first start feeling this way?”

• “What part of your story would help me understand your values better?”

Instead of talking about each other’s beliefs, we need to uncover the stories beneath them.

Empathy is not agreement

One of the most important ideas to take out of this blog and into the holiday season is:

Empathy doesn’t mean you think they’re right. Empathy means you're acknowledging how they got there.

You can say:

“I see how your experiences led you there.” Without saying, “and I agree with you."

You can honor someone’s story without endorsing their conclusion.

In How to Know a Person, David Brooks describes two types of people:

• Diminishers who shrink people to their worst takes or labels.

• Illuminators who ask the questions that bring the full person into view.

At the dinner table, you can’t control anyone else…but you can choose which one you show up as.

Questions that actually help

If you want to try something different tomorrow, here are questions you can keep in your back pocket:

Instead of:

• “How the hell can you possibly believe that?”

Try:

• “Can you tell me a story from your life that shaped how you see this?”

• “What do you wish people who disagree with you understood about where you’re coming from?”

• “When did this first become important to you?”

• “Is there any part of this where you feel torn or unsure?”

Then actively listen. 

These questions do three things:

1. Interrupt your predictions – you’re no longer filling in the story; you’re asking for it.

2. Expand your training data – you’re learning more about their lived experience.

3. Signal respect – you’re telling them, “You’re more than a position to me. You’re a person.”

This won’t magically make everyone get along.

But it can change you... And sometimes, that’s enough to shift the atmosphere of the whole room.

Takeaway:

Connection when there is disagreement isn’t an abstract ideal.

It’s a skill: notice your own story, challenge your own assumptions, and ask one more question than you normally would.

What you can do tomorrow at the table

You don’t need to remember every concept from this post. You don’t need a script. You don’t need to be perfect.

You just need a few anchors.

Here are three:

1. Remember: “My brain is a prediction machine based off of past experiences, beliefs, emotions, and often biased training data.”

2. Ask yourself: “What might I be missing from this person’s story?”

3. Be human: Choose one person and put it into practice.

Before the meal, decide on one person you’re willing to be more curious about. During conversation, ask them one question about their story, not their opinions.

If you feel yourself tightening, lean in and ask: “What am I missing?”

I’m not saying you have to fix your family, agree on everything, or abandon your values.

All I’m asking is that you try to remember that every person at that table is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, and your brain will only ever see a sliver of it.

That is what sonder is:

• The awareness that everyone around you is carrying a whole universe inside them.

You won’t see all of it tomorrow.

But you can be curious enough to see a little more.

With love this holiday season,

Dre

P.S. One more comic from the one and only Peanuts: