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Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality | Anil Seth | TED

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28M subscribers • 27 videos on Rounds

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  • Recommended by 2 people, in Hacker News, across 2 different months.
  • Presented by Anil Seth, neuroscientist, as the video describes them

For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

11M views9 years ago2 recommendations

Brain and nervesNeuroscienceMemory and learning

Anil Seth explains how the brain acts as a prediction engine, actively constructing our conscious experience of reality.

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence. If you love watching TED videos like this one, become a TED Member to support our mission of spreading ideas: ted.com/membership Follow TED! X: twitter.com/TEDTalks Instagram: instagram.com/ted Facebook: facebook.com/TED LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences TikTok: tiktok.com/@tedtoks The TED Talks channel features talks, performances and original series from the world's leading thinkers and doers. Subscribe to our channel for videos on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. Visit TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more. youtu.be/lyu7v7nWzfo TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-…. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at media-requests.ted.com #TED #TEDTalks #brain

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent introduction to the predictive processing model of brain function and consciousness.

hcarvalhoalvesin Hacker News • Recommends

On “What If Consciousness Comes First?”

I've recently watched this talk titled "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality" 1 by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk. 1 link to this video

guerrillain Hacker News • Recommends

On “To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions”

This TED talk has a great example where the same sound sounds different to you based on what you expect to hear, if you need to prove this to yourself 1. His thesis is also that the brain is a prediction machine. 1. link to this video

s_gourichonin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Our Visual Imagination Is Severely Limited”

Reminds me of this: > According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." (8) Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Seth - YouTube( link to this video )

yonoataraxiain Hacker News • Mentions

On “Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system”

Somewhat interesting: Bananas contain the ingredients necessary to produce dopamine. I can see how this all plays out as a way for some apes to get some bananas. Even social structures, fairness and other things (I love this video - two monkeys getting unequal pay link ) can be explained by a dopamine system that just likes to give us bananas and sex. And it's incentivized to conserve energy because this is better for survival (also called lazy) - interesting is that humans have some tendency to do stuff that don't necessarily is conserving energy. Maybe this is what makes us successful: Sometimes we invest excessive energy to try new things which happens to let us survive better through i…

sjjshvuiajhzin Hacker News • Mentions

On “An Honest Living”

…a set of transistors arranged in a particular state are both equally “real”. Consider that your experience of reality consists of a bunch of sensors absorbing random photons or other signals from your environment, stitched together by your brain software into a comprehensible whole. Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Seth - TED link to this video Your feeling of “unreality” is really a basic fact of your existence - if you were raised by wolves in the forest and never saw a single human invention, you still might find yourself wondering if you were stuck in a dream. In that way, even the “unreality” you feel is part of nature. Isn’t that cool? If you can’t stop thoughts like that fr…

psychoslavein Hacker News • Mentions

On “Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds”

Like, "Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality" as exposed by Anil Seth1? Found that one while searching for something like "the illusion of the self" a few years ago. It’s also easy to find this treated in various philosophy/religion through time and space. And anyway as consciousness is eager to project whatever looks like a possible fit, elements of suggesting prior arts can be inferred back as far as traces can be found. 1 link to this video