A new theory proposes the anatomical basis for Subjective Experience. Discover how it works, and why it's less mysterious than it seems.
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https://youtu.be/i-_-4F1rXasTranscript:
If you’ve ever had a psychedelic hallucination, you know that your subjective experience is constructed by your brain.
My own most vivid memory of that was my first time on mushrooms, appropriately, at Burning Man. My friend, who brought the mushrooms, her face appeared to be dotted with extra eyeballs, like twenty of them, all staring and blinking at me.
Obviously, my perception was an error. But the hallucination showed me something very important, not about the drug, but about my experience.
What I learned is that what I see, when I open my eyes, is not the real world. Rather, what is in my perception is actually a construction. A simulation, built by my brain.
Clearly, when my brain added all those extra eyeballs to my friend’s face, it was making some serious mistakes (I mean, of course). My perception of my friend’s face was clearly mis-constructed. But (and this is the part that blew MY mind) that also means that all of normal perception is likewise constructed.
My brain didn’t just build a weird experience for me on psilocybin.
It is always building my perception.
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I should probably quickly make a distinction between the words ‘perception’ and ‘sensation’. ‘Sensation’ is the neural signal. Some remote sensing neuron, whether in the skin or the nose, on the tongue or in the ear canal or wherever, that neuron is activated by some stimulus, and sends its signal to the brain. Sensation.
Once at the brain, that signal is DECODED by the relevant brain part, where its information may feed other brain processes like behavior.
Perception, by contrast, is this simulation I’m talking about, this CONSTRUCT. Perception is clearly informed by sensation, (at least during waking ours...), but as the mushroom trip showed me, the simulation isn’t always faithful in its reproduction.
And not all sensation ends up IN perception. For example: if you’re driving your car while having a conversation with your friend, (as long as the driving is going well), You’re probably experiencing more perception of the conversation than you are of the driving (even though the driving is the more dangerous part!) You’re wrapped up in that conversation, and the driving seems to be almost automatic?
However, your brain is receiving all kinds of sensation about the road. And it is using that sensation to motivate behavior: steering, using the turn signals, braking, etc. But neither the sensation nor the behavior is very well represented within perception. Perception instead includes mostly just the conversation.
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And don’t get me wrong; if the drive suddenly became problematic, then your perception would quickly shift over. You would suddenly become very aware of the road, and the conversation would disappear boop. Your brain tries to represent the most important things that are happening, right now, within subjective experience and it leaves a lot of the lesser information out.
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Your perception even intentionally leaves out the one thing that your eyes (and thus your brain) sees the most. Which is: your nose. Your nose is within your field of visual sensation, all the time. If you look, there it is. You can also see your eyelashes.
And if you wear...
