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Experiential Perceptions

Our brains create every color smell taste sound physical sensation emotion thing we experience.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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Professor Jim Al Khalili | Nothing is real

Length 18 seconds | Apr 6 2019

Professor Jim Al Khalili explains in 18 seconds why Quantum Mechanics says nothing is real.

*** Full YouTube video – Einstein’s Nightmare | The Secrets Of Quantum Physics

Optical | Illusion

Visual illusions occur due to properties of the visual areas of the brain as they receive and process information. In other words, your perception of an illusion has more to do with how your brain works — and less to do with the optics of your eye.

Interactive

Which way is the shape above spinning? Left to right? Right to left?

Try squinting or blinking – can you get it to spin the other way?

The truth is, seeing depends on the history of how we have looked at things in the past.

via Beau Lotto & (Lab of Misfits)

Fix your gaze on the black dot on the left side of this image. But wait! Finish reading this paragraph first. As you gaze at the left dot, try to answer this question: In what direction is the object on the right moving? Is it drifting diagonally, or is it moving up and down?

Remember, focus on the dot on the left.

It appears as though the object on the right is moving diagonally, up to the right and then back down to the left. Right? Right?! Actually, it’s not. It’s moving up and down in a straight, vertical line.

See for yourself. Trace it with your finger.

This is a visual illusion. That alternating black-white patch inside the object suggests diagonal motion and confuses our senses. Like all misperceptions, it teaches us that our experience of reality is not perfect. But this particular illusion has recently reinforced scientists’ understanding of deeper, almost philosophical truths about the nature of our consciousness.

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”

video

THE BRAIN WITH DAVID EAGLEMAN | All Is Not As It Seems | PBS

What we see doesn’t necessarily match on to the reality beyond our senses. David explains how the brain is tricked by the ‘Checker Shadow Illusion’.

David Eagleman: “Now this is about more than just a visual illusion. It’s about a fact that’s central to our lives. Our perception of reality has less to do with what’s happening out there (he looks at world around him), and more to do with in here (points to brain).”

Beau Lotto Optical Illusion | TED

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto’s color games puzzle your vision to spotlight how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what’s really out there.

Interactive

Is Color An Illusion?

Color is Created by Brains

CBC : Nature of Things

Your brain is lying to you — colour is all in your head, and other ‘colourful’ facts

Colour is not part of our world, says neuroscientist … article link

BBC : news/science-environment

Do you see what I see?

Your brain is lying to you — colour is all in your head, and other ‘colourful’ facts

Scientific American

Illusory Color & the Brain

Many people believe that color is a defining and essential property of objects, one depending entirely on the specific wavelengths of light reflected from them. But this belief is mistaken. Color is a sensation created in the brain.

Do Our Senses Reveal the World—Or Do They Obscure It? | Beau Lotto

Beau Lotto Neuroscientist

We know the world exists, we just don’t know what it actually looks like—and it’s likely that we never will, says neuroscientist Beau Lotto.

Humans can only access reality, whatever it may be, through the filter of our sensory organs, which interpret “inherently meaningless” data in ways that are useful for our survival. We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world that helps us to live. It can be a concept that’s hard to wrap your mind around: how is that chair not as I see it? What color is an apple, really? Lotto calls on two clarifying examples: “Dressgate”, which blew people’s minds in 2015 and exposed that perception is not objective, and the color spectrum, of which we only see a small slice of. Beau Lotto is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.

video

Is Color A Shared Illusion?

Is Your Red The Same as My Red?| Vsauce

Anyone with normal color vision agrees that blood is roughly the same color as strawberries. That is, they’re all red. But could it be that what you call “red” is someone else’s “blue”?

Seeing 'other' colors for the first time

Length 6:53 | Jan 2019

4 people with color blindness trying special glasses that let them see the colors they normally can’t.

Blob Perception Illusion | Lisa Feldman Barrett

Length 1:42 | 2018

Short excerpt from Lisa Feldman Barrett TED Talk “You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them“

Hollow Nut Illusion | Al Seckel

Length 1:17 | 2014

Al Seckel shows how eye tricks can reveal the way the brain processes visual information — or fails to do so.

9 second looping video of the ‘Crazy Nuts” illusion to make it easier to study its effects.

Mask Illusion | Royal

Length 1:17 | 2014

Al Seckel shows how eye tricks can reveal the way the brain processes visual information — or fails to do so.

Do Blind People Understand Vision? | Tommy Edison

Length 5:45 | Mar 2016

Tommy Edison, who has been blind since birth, talks about his understanding of vision, what impresses him about sight, and one fear that’s motivated by blindness.

Interactive

Go look in a mirror.

Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you're looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again.

When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location.

The illusion: you never see your eyes move.

What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you're changing your eye position? (Remember that it's easy to detect someone else's eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)

Go look in a mirror.

Here’s a fun exercise, though you might not want to do it alone. Stare into a mirror for several minutes and you may notice your face begin to distort. It could even morph into something downright scary.

Seeing monsters in mirrors has long been an effective horror movie device and grist for urban legends. It might sound like a bunch of superstitious hooey, but scientific research now says that seeing altered images in a mirror is a real thing, most likely due in part to a type of optical illusion called "peripheral fading" or the Troxler Effect.

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Smell | Illusion

How We Detect Molecules | The Secrets Of Quantum Physics | Spark

Length 3:13 | 2018

You could be smelling through vibrations according to a quantum mechanics theory. Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the story of arguably the most important, accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever: quantum physics.

Sound | Illusion

An auditory illusion is an illusion of hearing, the aural equivalent of an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or “impossible” sounds.

How Loud Can Sound Physically Get?

Length 12:30 | 2022

Explanation of all sound properties being a subjective creation of the brain.

Sound Illusions - Shepard Tone

Emotion | Illusion

An auditory illusion is an illusion of hearing, the aural equivalent of an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or “impossible” sounds.

This is why you feel the way you feel

Emotions: Your Brain Creates Them

Length 18:28 | Dec 2017

Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett

Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are.

Self | illusion

Cognitive Bias

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.

Although the reality of these biases is confirmed by replicable research,there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them.Some are effects of information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive (“cold”) bias, such as mental noise, or motivational (“hot”) bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time.

Time | Illusion

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.

So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.

The illusion of Time – NATURE.COM/

When Is Now? | PBS Be Smart

Length 21:00 | 2021

When is now? Seems like a pretty simple question… just look at your watch. But do you and I share the same “now”? Let’s journey from Einstein’s thought experiments about relativity to cutting edge neuroscience research to try and answer that question.

Reality | Illusion

Donald Hoffman | Do we see reality as it is? | TED Talk

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is … or as we need it to be?

Donald D. Hoffman doesn’t think it’s real.

In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds re-construct reality for us.

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Definitions & FAQ

ADVANCED

adjective: far on or ahead in development or progress.

SYNONYMS. progress, make progress, make headway, develop, improve, become better, thrive, flourish, prosper, mature. evolve, make strides, move forward, move forward in leaps and bounds, move ahead, get ahead. informal go places, get somewhere.

ADVANCED | Civilization

Kardashev scale

Typical definitions include these types traits:
Civilization is characterized by five traits: specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, advanced technology, and advanced cities.

ADVANCED | Free Will

Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

Free will is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. There are numerous different concerns about threats to the possibility of free will, varying by how exactly it is conceived, which is a matter of some debate.

Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events.

BCI - brain computer interface

devices that enable its users to interact with computers by mean of brain-activity only