How your brain works

In this video, when I say “your experience is that comparison,” I mean that your conscious perception is an internally generated model of reality informed and modified by all the sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and other sensory phenomena streaming into your brain at every moment.

The neuroscientist, Anil Seth, argues for this understanding of perception in an interview with NPR: “Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.”

One piece of evidence for this is that every night, most of us enter into a far less constrained model of reality, which we call “dreaming.” During dreaming, the brain is still generating a model of reality, but it is receiving very little sensory information and it is worse at thinking critically about how physical and social reality tend to operate. That’s why, in dreams, it doesn’t seem strange that one environment can instantaneously switch to another for no good reason. It’s also why you may find yourself doing morally questionable things without thinking twice.

Obviously, the brain is a lot more complicated than I’ve made it seem here. That’s why I have an entire video series aimed at introducing you to how the brain works in more detail. Check out my channel if you're interested!

Thanks for your time and I hope you have a great day.
Andrew

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