• Question: Could there be the possibility that although our brain does create what is thought to be an accurate view of reality, it could be extremely incorrect and everything we see is not what our brains perceive it to be?

    Asked by anon-284017 on 4 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      Excellent question! I think this can be answered both on a philosophical level and psychological, notably psychosis and schizophrenia – I will stick to psychological as this is my area!

      In schizophrenia, you have a break from reality. You think things that others don’t. Things like believing MI5 is watching you, or that you are Jesus. And you hold these convictions with such certainty it would be like telling you the sky is green no matter how much you see it as blue. So yes, in that respect our brains can really mess with how we view the world.
      Psychosis and schizophrenia can also mess with how we see the world. Those with the disorder can experience issues in all senses (touch, taste etc.) but most notably hallucinations of sound (so hearing voices that aren’t there) or visual, so seeing things others don’t.
      Combined together, with the concept of ‘lack of insight’ where they believe 100% what that are experiencing as the real truth is a scary concept for how much our brain can derail from normality or how other people’s perceptions of reality.
      I think it’s also a philosophical question too. How do we know we are not in the matrix? What if there is nothing outside of the context of our brain? No external reality? What does that mean for us as living beings? Interesting stuff and depends how far you want to go down the rabbit hole!

    • Photo: Christina Brown

      Christina Brown answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      Hi Anastacia,
      This is a really important question – what you’re describing is the top-down processing of perception. This is the idea that what you have already learned about the world biases what you new information is coming in. To say it would be ‘extremely’ incorrect is probably not true, but you previous biases will affect how you interact with people or the environment. The colours you perceive in the world are not correct, for example, as they are based on what wavelengths of light the cells in our retina can absorb.
      However there is a limit to top-down processing as it wouldn’t be advantageous for us to perceive the world so incorrectly. As more new information comes in, then your previous biases tend to change and become moulded by the new information.

    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 5 Mar 2021: last edited 5 Mar 2021 11:17 am

      Your question reminds me of a powerful film I’ve seen ages ago: ‘The Beatiful Mind’, which is based on the life of the mathematician John Nash. All along, John thought that his life as a code breaker was hinged on reality only to find out that it was due to his schizophrenia and delusions taking over. Of course, John Nash’s case verges on the extreme side, but it’s a poignant reminder that our perception is not always accurate.

    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      This is a super interesting questions, the other scientists have all explained this super well so I’ll just add a little bit on to it. We are very much limited by our biology, our brains try their best to make sense of what we see, but we can mess that up super easily (look at some visual illusions, or the “Laurel and Yanny” auditory illusion from a few years ago). Colours that I perceive can also be different from the colours you perceive, we have special cells in our eyes that detect light at specific wavelengths (which determines what colour it is), but those cells are not perfect.
      On top of this there is a LOT we don’t perceive! We have 3 different colour receptors, whereas a Mantis Shrimp have 16 different colours! We can only hear sounds between 20 and 20,000 hertz, but sounds definitely exist outside of those frequencies too! So really we don’t perceive the world as it truly is – I encourage you to Google what birds look like under UV light, they look amazing! But we don’t have the ability to perceive those colours without some assistance.
      One final bit, our perception of time (how long it takes between things happening) is also tied to our brain, we have a special chemicals (like Serotonin which makes us happy) that influence how quickly we experience things happening – if we don’t have enough of these chemicals then we start to feel time go by a little slower (something that takes 5 seconds might feel like it takes 5 1/2).

      Our view of the world relies on the limits of our brain and body, but I think we do a pretty good job – the important information that we need is all there – it doesn’t REALLY matter that we only have 3 different colour receptors when the Mantis Shrimp has 16, but we’re definitely missing out on some cool stuff

    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021: last edited 5 Mar 2021 1:54 pm

      This is a really interesting question that everyone has answered really well but here is my take from the perspective of the fly!
      When a fly is annoyingly buzzing around the house (and the cats are chasing it), all you want to do is get it out a window! In fact, often you see it buzzing around a window you consider that the fly wants to leave! You wonder why the fly can’t get out (it is just a window after all!). So we can see the fly wants to get out, but it can’t! Perhaps it lacks the ‘view of reality’ that helps it leave. I would think this occurs for us too, perhaps there are loads of things we can’t do like see smells and taste touch! Certainly an interesting area to explore! Perhaps there’s more than 3 dimensions and everything is wacky and awesome! The world could be even more complex than it already is! It would be awesome to know!

    • Photo: David McGonigle

      David McGonigle answered on 9 Mar 2021:

      Hiya Anastacia! Sorry to be a bit slow in answering – had some internet ‘issues’ recently. As I’m rather late to the party there are some lovely answers already, so I’ll try not to go over similar ground. For once (!) I’m going to be brief, and give you a really basic but powerful example of how some of what we ‘see’ can be generated by the brain itself. You may know that we all have a ‘blind spot’ in our eyes – it’s where all the wiring from the receptors in the eye goes to eventually connect up to the brain. As this bit of the eye is all wires (or ‘axons’, to give them their proper name!), there can’t be any receptors there. This is pretty weird – why don’t we see a big hole in our sight, then? Well, it’s because our eyes are constantly making tiny movements, small enough that we don’t perceive them. Even when we think we’re staring at something, these movements allow the brain, via the eyes, to get an idea of what we’re looking at – and so, effectively, ‘filling in’ the blind spot! You can experience the blind spot with the famous ‘disappearing elephant’ experiment – here’s a wee link, although the elephant is swapped with Richard Wiesmann’s head in this one! https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17511-the-blind-spot-and-the-vanishing-head-illusion/

      so I’ll do what I usually do when I’m stumped by a question: quote philip k dick, and say ‘ reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’.

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