- Pyrotrain
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- Exalted Legendary Member
A while back, I read a book titled Incognito written by renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman.
In Incognito, Dr. Eagleman makes some interesting observations.
The eyes do not "see". They merely confirm that everything is where the brain says it should be. Basically, the eye has a very small region of focus. The periphery of the eye is usually somewhat hazy or blurry. Eagleman claims that once the eye detects the environment, the brain takes over.
Suddenly, our vision isn't vision, but rather hallucination. The eyes merely confirm what our brains suppose to be true.
What about other senses? How about the sense of time?
In one experiment, a few dozen test subjects were told to flip a light switch to turn on a light. A small delay was added into the circuit, so the light would take a few milliseconds longer to turn on. After several repetitions, the delay was removed.
The test subjects swore the light turned on before the switch was flipped.
How is this possible? How can our brain be feeding us information that is quite false?
How about Phantom Limb Syndrome? The brain believes it is receiving information from a limb that isn't there.
What if the brain is simply generating a reality for us to live in, and is merely fooling us into believing it?
Brains have the ability to both feel and see what isn't there. People have heard voices in their heads. There have been cases of scrambled tastes and scents. And even our sense of time is relative to the brain.
The brain is mightier than we might imagine.