How the brain creates our personality and the world around us

Every morning we open our eyes and see the world. Understandable and familiar. It consists of a bedside table, a favorite coffee machine and a familiar view from the window. But there is also something very familiar - understanding what it is to be yourself. It comes right after waking up and does it so skillfully that we don't even notice.

Our “I” appears to us as something unified and permanent. Just a recipient of information in the endless process of perceiving the world through the senses. Or, conversely, the "commander in chief", who decides what and when to do next. We feel, we think and we act. In any case, we think so.

But what if our “I” is just another layer of perception of the world? And the way we see it is nothing more than a "controlled hallucination", the best guess of our mind, which is determined not by reliability, but by utility? Neuroscientist Anil Seth ponders these questions.

How the brain creates the world

Sensory signals in their purest form, such as electromagnetic waves that affect the retina of the eye, or acoustic waves that are read by the eardrums, are quite ambiguous. Although they reflect real things, they do so only indirectly. After all, our eyes are not transparent windows overlooking the world around us, like our ears, and any other sense organs.

The world that appears around us every conscious moment, a world full of people and objects that have shape, color and location, is always created by our brain. This is due to what neuroscientists call inference. This is the process of deriving conclusions based on the processing of our brain's most appropriate guesses, which is hidden by neurons.

Let's say you have a red coffee mug in front of you. You see it this way because "red coffee mug" is the brain's best guess, based on the hidden and essentially unknowable sensory inputs it receives. eyes. Think for a moment about the color red. He exists? No. Scientists have long proved that any colors that we see are just a property of material objects to reflect electromagnetic waves in the visible range. And the whole concept of color is built on this. This means that our perception at the same time can be both more and less than what the real world is.

How then does our brain “generate” colors? It tracks the consistency and regularity of how objects and surfaces reflect light. And then simply predicts what is causing the sensory inputs. It is the content of this prediction that we "read" as red. Does this mean that it exists in our head, and not in the world? No. To perceive red, both the world around us and our brain, which processes its signals, are necessary.

This whole process can be called "controlled hallucination". It lies in the fact that our brain is constantly making predictions for sensory signals, whether they come from the world around us or our body. In this case, signals can also become prediction errors, telling the brain the difference between what it expects, and what it receives. Such a system helps the mind to constantly update its predictions.

Perception is not the process of reading sensory signals. It is a neural fantasy connected to reality by an endless dance of predictions and errors. All our experience is active constructions that are formed from within. And here there is a continuity between perception and what is usually called a hallucination, when a person sees or hears something that others do not see or hear.

But in normal perception, control is important. Our perceptual experience is not arbitrary. The mind does not create reality. If you need to feel the color consciousness, then physical objects, the same coffee mug, exist in the world in any case, whether we perceive them or not. But what these objects look like is entirely our design, the best guesses of our brain. And since we are all different, everyone lives in their own individual universe.

How the brain creates personality

Our "I" is also a "controlled hallucination", but of a completely different kind. It has to do with controlling one's own body. At the same time, the experience of being oneself consists of many different parts, which are usually closely related, but can be separated from each other in mental or neurological diseases.

There are many different ways to understand my "I". There is a long experience of being a particular person with a name and memories created by the social or cultural environment. There is an experience of free will associated with our intentions and situations in which we are the cause of what happens. There is an experience of perceiving the world from a certain point of view, for example, from the first person. There is a bodily experience when we identify ourselves with an object that is our own body. And finally, the deepest and most basic is the experience of being alive. All these aspects are predictions of different types. And chief among them is that part of perception which regulates our body and keeps us alive.

If you pull this thread, a lot will open up. Everything that is born in our consciousness is a prediction of perception, and all our experience, our conscious experiences are deeply rooted in our human nature. We cognize the surrounding world and ourselves in it through our living body and thanks to it.

Who are we really? We are red. We exist, but not necessarily in the way we imagine.