How Your Brain Constructs—And Sometimes Distorts—Your Experience of the World

You probably think you’re listening to my voice right now. But what if I told you that you’re actually experiencing a sophisticated hallucination?

Perception isn’t the passive process that most of us imagine it to be, with our senses simply recording reality and sending it up to our brains for processing. Instead, our brains are constantly constructing theories about what’s going on around us—and sometimes our brains get reality wrong.

Here to explain this mind-bending way of looking at, well, the mind, is Daniel Yon, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Daniel is also the author of a recent book called A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American