You can trust what’s in front of your eyes, right? Turns out… not really. Everything we see is processed through a filter of our prior expectations. Our brains fill the gaps in the data they receive to create a “reality” that we can understand. If everything we see and hear is just a construct, are we all living in our own hallucinations? 

Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, explains our world of illusions to Olly Mann. 

• “There is a real world out there – but we experience it as a construction. We never experience things as they really are. We experience the world as WE are, not as IT is.” – Anil Seth

• “We think our brains are ‘reading out’ the world but it is totally the other way around… The brain is continually making predictions about what is out there.” – Anil Seth

Buy Being You: A New Science of Consciousness through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund WHY? by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

https://uk.bookshop.org/a/13277/9781399804516

WHY? is written and presented by Olly Mann. Produced by Anne-Marie Luff and Eliza Davis Beard. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Managing editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Artwork by James Parrett. Music by DJ Food. WHY? is a Podmasters Production.

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