Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

A great TED talk.

2 Likes

I like the way he says that the brain canā€™t hear anything, see anything, etc. but gets sensory information from the sense organs and tries to put it together. However, the brainā€™s basis of perception, instead of relying largely on sensory signals coming into the brain, it relies as much, or more on perceptive predictions, generating our version of reality.

1 Like

Clearly our mind creates a mental model of the world, based on sensory input, and I think this is what the suttas describe. Iā€™m not sure about the word ā€œhallucinatesā€ though, it implies that our mental model has no correlation to sensory input.

1 Like

Iā€™m also bit concerned about this word choiceā€¦ But what he describes as hallucinations is something similar to what, I think, in EBT is called abhisaį¹…khāroti - to make up, to construct or to fabricate something out of raw materials. Itā€™s not necessarily false or fake but just points to the fact that a sense of reality is an active product of a mind which has some internal ā€œbaggageā€.

2 Likes

I wouldnā€™t use the word ā€œhallucinationā€ either, but he doesnā€™t appear to have a Buddhist orientation. However, he does differentiate a controlled hallucination from un uncontrolled. I might consider it as more of subjective perception.