10/20/2025

Gaslighters Manipulate How Our Brains Predict

Losing touch with what’s real is indicative of insanity

Gaslighters conjure up a model of the world that is false to gain power and control over their targets. If targets fall for the illusion, they become progressively untethered from reality. Losing touch with what’s real is indicative of insanity, which is exactly what the gaslighters set out to accomplish. Gaslighters make their targets mentally unstable, then insist they must rule over them, because they are mentally unstable.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse that zeros in on the way we interact with and know ourselves and the world. It specifically attacks our mind’s mechanisms for distinguishing between truth and lies, reality and illusion, knowledge and opinion. Gaslighting is a mental version of provoking someone into self-defence, then condemning them for being violent.

Recent research by Willis Klein, Susan Wood, and Jennifer Bartz examines the “prediction error minimization” (PEM) framework of the brain that gaslighters appear to exploit in causing a target to lose trust in their ability to make sense of reality. The gaslighters’ goal is to make targets trust in the gaslighters’ version of reality while believing that they themselves are “epistemically incompetent."

Please select this link to read the complete article from Psychology Today.