081910 Trying to Find My Way... Phoenix Arizona

So vision is not effortless. Nor is it faithful: if you ever believed that your brain gives an accurate representation of what is “out there” in the same way that a movie camera would, then David Brown’s untouched photographs should quickly disabuse you of that notion. Instead, your attentional machinery slowly crawls the scene, analyzing interesting landmarks until it detects what is useful for the next step. In the case of one of Brown’s visual moments in time, you might be in the middle of looking for the door to the shop, or where to step, or whether the traffic light is ready to let you cross. All the other details are unconsciously and nimbly filtered out. – Dr. David Eagleman

Check out this fascinating video about perception. It intersects with my Trying to Find My Way… Series exploring perception, consciousness and the fabric of reality .

Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so.

Reality is more distorted than we think.
with
Big Think

BEAU LOTTO:

Is there external reality? Of course there's an external reality. The world exists. It's just that we don't see it as it is. We can never see it as it is. In fact it's even useful to not see it as it is. And the reason is because we have no direct access to that physical world other than through our senses. And because our senses conflate multiple aspects of that world, we can never know whether our perceptions are in any way accurate. It's not so much do we see the world in the way that it really is, but do we actually even see it accurately? And the answer is no, we don't.

ALVA NOË

However paradoxical it sounds, if we think of what is visible as just what projects to the eyes, we see much more than is visible. Let me give you an example. I walk into a room and there's graffiti on the wall and imagine it's graffiti that I find really offensive. I look at it, I flush, my heart starts to race, I'm outraged, I'm taken aback. Of course, if I didn't know the language in which it was written, I could have had exactly the same retinal events and the same events in my early visual system, without any corresponding reaction. Much more shows up for us than just what projects into our nervous system.