Why Reality May Just Be A Hallucination

Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, explains the link between perception and reality. Seth believes reality as we know it comes from activity of our brain. Following is a transcript of the video. 

Anil Seth: How do we know that we experience the real world? In fact, we probably don't. Everything that we perceive, everything that we experience, is a result of the brain interpreting the sensory information that comes in in a particular way.

I'm Anil Seth. I'm a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK. Now you could say that all of our experiences are all hallucinated. It's just that whenever we agree about what's out there, that's what we call reality. Brain brings to bear its prior expectations about what's out there in order to interpret this massive, noisy, and ambiguous sensory information that it continually encounters.

Perception, instead of just being a reflection of what's actually there in the world, is always this active process of interpretation. It's easy to assume that we see with our eyes. In fact, we see with our brains. Our eyes are of course necessary, but what we actually end up perceiving is much more a product of how our brain interprets all this information from the eyes than the eyes being this window into an objective external reality. And when the balance is disturbed between how the brain interprets sensory information and what the sensory information actually is, well, that's when people start to see things that other people don't, and that's what we call hallucination.

When you look at a cloud, and sometimes you can see faces in clouds, now that's a kind of hallucination. Other people who will see things that really other people don't see, that's just a different balance that they have between how their prior expectations influence the sensory data that comes in. Another aspect of this is when you take things like psychedelic drugs. That also leads people to have unusual experiences, to see things that aren't there. Again, it doesn't mean that these things really exist. It just means that your brain is working in a different way so that its prior expectations come to dominate this sensory information.

We can see a number of things that happen in the brain on psychedelics. One of the things that happens is the brain generally becomes a bit more disorganized. Normally in the brain, different parts of the brain have activity that correlates. So we see all these networks in the brain with different areas active at the same time, and then they diminish their activity at the same time as well. How visual hallucinations in the psychedelic state might come about could be that in the psychedelic state, what you perceive is dependent more on the brain than the sensory data that's coming in through the eyes and the ears. And we have the opportunity now to try to characterize exactly how and why this happens.

But what we experience as being real is a construction of the brain. So when I experience a particular color, that doesn't mean that color exists out there in the universe, that a red mug is actually painted some color that exists independently of my mind and brain. No, red is something that my brain constructs in order to interpret visual information. This leads to the question, is anything real? Is anything really there?

[jellay]

So basically I’m hallucinating this whole video????

[sohamtalekar]

I had somehow figured this out at age 14. Now I just don't care about anything cause nothing's real unless you agree it's real

[monalisa]

there is no matter....just an ocean of vibration... your brain is like a radio picking frequencies

[human]

As soon as one sees the irony of what everyone calls reality, it's a pain to watch all these day-to-day fools living intensively in their small perception of what they think "is". This is why I am agnostic.

[maestrosk]

Materialism is enjoying its last decade of domination. Keep having fun, Anil.

[sidious]

There is a good channel for this material on YouTube. It's called Afterlife Topics And Metaphysics 😎

[ivaerz]

Came for Neo . Left with the bald guy.

[tomacana]

A good video about how the brain develops it's perceptions of the world. The part I like begins at about the 5 minute mark of the video. The introduction is best to watch but after that he begins to discuss the part about how our multi-linear perceptions are really our controlled perceptions.

[sebastiananselmocarretero]

There's a part in our brain that is used to see other human's faces and recognize them as human. A side effect of this is that we often find faces where there are not. I believe it's called the amygdila, and it may have something to do with what the main idea of the video touched on.

[jasondiew]

Ok but how are you not freaked out by this

[meowjmeowington]

You experience as fast as you create. You sow as you tear

[InvestingHustler]

My brain one hallucinated reality .. I think I was on shrooms never again 🤢

[lol-gech]

Were not in a world of reality but a world of perceptions

[enonymuz]

I do believe if reality is a visualization then you can simply imagine yourself in a warzone then after your fight or flight sense are activated so does people around you as they sense those signs from you even tho its just the daily life. This is clearly a major breakthrough in psychology and explain why some people are just naturally charismatic and people differences in IQ level

[jaytamayo]

Very true!!! My balance was distorted. I used to be a Go Getter. I act, I just do. Then bad things happened. Those affected me.

[catalepsy]

so which part of the brain is actually "ME"? :O

[blame]

this is what im thinking about for like a year, ey great job

[ivanlovric]

I wonder if he is having lunch with RA or other guys when they are not busy being gods

[HaSTaxHaX]

"Your reality" *DDLC Flashbacks*

[edspencer]

There's a difference between hallucinations and interpretation. Interpretation is the difference between the perception of a subject between individuals. Hallucinations happen when you like to many toads!