You've Never Seen Reality

This is an audio essay about the strangest fact in perception neuroscience: you have never once touched reality. Behind your eyes it is completely dark and completely silent. Your brain has never seen the sun, never heard a voice, and out of nothing but faint electrical pulses it paints the entire world you think you are looking at. Everything you experience is a controlled hallucination. Color, the seamless three dimensional world, even the felt "now" are all constructed inside the skull, the controlled hallucination Anil Seth says we all agree to call reality. We trace it from Helmholtz's unconscious inference through Friston and Clark's predictive processing, the brain as a prediction machine, then prove it on your own senses with the 2015 dress, the blind spot, the McGurk effect, and the tenth of a second lag that means you live in your brain's predicted future. Then the dark turn becomes a gentle one: if reality is a guess, so is your fear, your certainty, and your story of who you are, and a model can be updated.

Follow the show: https://rss.com/podcasts/life-with-heathcliff/ · Full visual essay on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@life-with-heathcliff · My book, The Shadow You Carry: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6XSHJ4V