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I've caught my brain being wrong about reality once. I was in a gas station bathroom that didn't have a mirror. After I washed my hands I looked up and for just a split second I could see my face being reflected back at me. It was a crazy feeling.

People with schizophrenia watching this: "yeah, no shit".

4 decades ago I experienced what is commonly known as road hypnosis. I was about to drive down the mountains on one side of a large desert valley in Utah, then abruptly I was up in the mountains on the far side of the valley and glancing at my clock I could see two hours had passed. These were two hours of which I had no memory but, clearly, I was not asleep but driving precisely as I normally would have. It was so normal it left no memory because your mind only puts things to longer term memory if they are somehow different in pattern from everything else in there. This is why you might have pulled the chair out at your dinner table every night for twenty years and have no distinct memory of any time you did it, except that one time when you set your chair leg down on the cat's tail. The thing is, I have two hours of which I was not conscious--because apparently consciousness requires committing something to memory and then reviewing the memory. We then kid ourselves into thinking that it was us that did the actions we remember. Actually, it was the various subsystems that compose our brain doing their own thing. Science seems to be proving that many, if not all, things that we do in a rush are acted on before we are consciously aware of them. That would make our consciousness something like an after-action committee that then looks back on what was done and may say, "That wasn't great, we could do better. In the future, do it this other way." In effect, we are attempting to program the appropriate subsystems into doing it that way. I play an online game with many other people and a huge amount of data is constantly pouring into my computer and all being written to a log file. I have a program running in the background that parses that log file constantly, and when it spots a pattern that I have previously identified, something like "the villain begins to point his finger at you and cast a spell" the program then flashes a message across the screen and reads it out loud, so that I don't miss it. Perhaps something like: "the villain is casting on you! DUCK!" When we go under general anesthesia, the way it works is the various sub-systems of the brain are chemically separated. In other words, we are effectively disassembled. Then we (hopefully, but not always) come back online as the chemical separations wear off. As we get older, time seems to pass much more quickly. This is because we have seen so many patterns that we record significantly less, because much of what we experience so closely resembles patterns we have already stored, and we do not commit them to memory. Personally, I don't like what all this seems to imply about the nature of consciousness. But my likes and dislikes don't enter into it.

Psychedelics teaches you this first-hand. By progressively jumbling up your senses, thoughts and eventually _ego_ as more and more of the drug passes through your blood-brain barrier, it forces you to come to terms with what you really are. It's like turning off parts of a computer one-by-one to debug where a specific issue is coming from. "oh my eyes are showing the wrong colors, that's weird but that's not me, it's just my eyes... oh i thought my friend said something but they were quiet the whole time, that's weird but that's just my ears... oh i caught myself talking to my sober friend like he is seeing what i'm seeing even though i'm the only one on the drug, i guess it jumbled my empathy too? my ability to put myself in others' shoes...? oh my thoughts are starting to loop, wow ok i _really_ expected my thoughts to be me... umm who is that looking at me in the mirror? he's looking real confused and a bit scared. that's ok! im confused too :)" You'll then realize that this "me" you're looking for is not one particular thing, it's all of those components working together. No central "soul" that you can isolate and point to. Trying to find it is silly. It's like running into the Netflix headquarters screaming "WHERE IS NETFLIX", looking behind the secretary desk only finding the secretary, and the CEO's office only finding the CEO, and the janitor's closet only finding the janitor, and the tech department only finding nerds. Does Netflix just not exist? Of course it does you watch it all the time! But it's more of a concept rather than one tangible object. An _idea_ upheld by many different contributors working together to make that _idea_ into a _thing._

Lucid dreaming is a great example of this. In most dreams you never really know it's a dream because while you're awake you always assume you are awake, thus that very thoght process transfers over to the dream. You can never really tell based on how real the dream feels, you have to actually rely on other tests because dreams can replicate all your senses to vivid and vibrant detail. While in a lucid dream you know you're dreaming so you can actually study and observe the environment. Almost every time I get lucid I'm just in awe of how my mind can create such realistic depictions of the world within my own mind

Neuroscience: You guys, your not experiencing reality "as it is". Philosophy: Bro, your about 2500 years late to this conversation.

I once thought of it like this... you're watching a movie of your life in front of you. it happens more when you are more tired or have a foggy mind. whenever you're more alert, less tired, the closer you get to actually experience reality as close as possible, without delays. Lets say being tired or intoxicated adds lag and MS to the "screen" you're looking into.

I distinctly remember asking my mom when I was 4 years old if she saw the same color of red that I saw, and realizing there was no way to know the answer for sure.

yep. seems like having a giant nose in front of my face blocking my sight constantly would be a great evolutionary disadvantage, but my big brain top down predictive model just removes it. easy peasy.

"it all in your head" "Yeah, everything is"

I have Complex PTSD and my experience of healing has been a trip in updating and recalibrating my brain's predictive processing. My brain was conditioned under duress, so it can make attribution errors in the present based on my once helpful, and now faulty model. My therapist does deep brain reorienting with me to help process the past and update my working model. Its been interesting and challenging to come out of denial and understand my experiences better. One interesting thing I noticed is that my brain can create a feedback loop between muscle armoring and my internal experience of anxiety. My muscle armoring increases my experience of anxiety, which increases my muscle armoring, which increases my experience of anxiety. If I interrupt the loop by doing body movement to reduce the muscle armoring or take a muscle relaxer, my experience of anxiety decreases as well. And that's just one example of how my working model has changed as I continue to heal.

33 grams of mushrooms proves this correct.

So, human consciousness is essentially a simulation created by the brain, and calibrated by the senses. This actually explains imagination and the weirdness of dreams. When you're asleep, your mind continues to simulate the world, but there's no incoming sensory input to calibrate that simulation. As a result, the dream becomes a surreal experience.

One of the weirdest things that I learned is that sight doesn’t work how you think it does. People tend to think of “sight” as being one thing, that we have a sight part of the brain that sees things. In reality, sight works in layers, we have different parts that comprehend color, shape, orientation, recognition, familiarity, and so on, and your brain makes a composite out of those that seems to be sight. They don’t all work at the same time, either, but in a row. You see shapes first, because your brain wants to recognize threats in the form of dangerous snakes and the like so you can avoid it before it bothers comprehending color or texture and decides it’s a garden hose.

This explains many, many things. An example of this is when I'm at the gym, and I'm watching a movie on one of the TVs there. I noticed that, if my attention is focused on the movie, me running on the treadmill fades away from my perception. I don't even hear my breathing or my music or even notice that I'm running or doing anything. It is like my brain filters anything out that isn't the movie because it isn't necessary at that moment. It removes those "updates" because they don't matter. As long as I'm still running and I can watch the movie, no need to let me know about the other inputs as they haven't changed. It might even be some kind of "overclock protection" since I'm exerting a lot of energy and heat.

I think a great analogy for how predictive processing works is to equate what we as humans see or experience as similar to that of what a computer or phone screen shows us. Because if you get into the nitty gritty details of how computers and programming works, it's in actuality a lot of 1's and 0's as well as complex strings of text, numbers, lines, words etc all writen and formatted in ways that the average consumer (who doesn't have a degree in programming or coding) simply wouldn't be able to understand or make sense of, if presented as is. So to make the presentation of information actually understandable to the average person, the programming and coding is shown as a user friendly interface, like a desktop or your phones default screen with all of your apps neatly placed. All of the complicated "reality" has been simplified into something that's efficient to navigate and easy to understand, so that the user doesn't have to waste time deciphering all of the programming or code in order to be able to make simple decisions or choices such as setting an alarm or opening up their browser. And i believe our brain does the same thing. It takes the complexity of reality (all of the thousands or millions of individual inputs of sensory data) and simplifies it into a manageable and friendly user interface in the form of what we see and feel when we look around or experience the world. Predictive processing is essentially our brains prioritizing speed and efficiency over accuracy. The brain isn't looking for the optimal answer, solution or course of action but whichever is "good enough" and this works surprisingly well most of the time (at least within the context of evolutionary survival considering how far humanity has made it). And while i'm not going to go too deep into it as this comment is already long enough, i think this model of predictive processing also helps explain a lot about autism and how it differs from the neurotypcal brain as the autistic brain's predtictive processing is less "all encompassing" for better and for worse (this usually manifests in the form of a higher priority of accuracy but at the cost of speed and efficiency and much more energy use as filtering information is a more conscious process as opposed to subconscious which explains why autistic people tend to get tired or overwhelmed more easily).

"prepare to feel weird about stuff" That's about half of my existence.

Terry Pratchett taught me this lesson 30 years ago. Humans ignore anything that doesn't fit their idea of reality.

I feel this ALL the time. My vision is poor, and I often see shapes, colors, or even WORDS that are not there, based on context clues. Words example is seeing a word on a screen, but the fuzzy letters are just guessed by my brain, and I'm CONVINCED it's the real word until I look much closer, until I can focus.

'Your brain is buffering reality.' That very sentense makes so much sense after contemplating it for a moment.

As well as when you blink, your brain "edits" out when your eyes flit from place to place. Flit your eyes towards a clock with a ticking second hand. The first tick of the second hand seems to take a little longer than a second. This is because your brain fills in the bit it cuts out when your eyes flit, with extra "footage" of the first thing you see after switching your gaze. Try it.

Ah dang Kyle, you made my brain realize that when I blink that I have interruptions in my vision and now I notice it. Now I'll have to sleep to reset it to default settings.

watching this for the third time now. this is one of the most fascinating new things i've learned in a while!!

Great video! The introduction to these complex topics was masterfully done. The claim that "perception is reality" is an oversimplification that overlooks the intricate relationship between the two. Perception, though significant, is merely a part of the vast construct that is reality. It exists not as the totality of reality but as an evolved tool, a predictive program ingeniously devised by evolution to help organisms navigate their surroundings. This understanding implies that reality begets perception, framing it as a sophisticated mechanism for interaction with the world. When it comes to free will, I approach it as a phenomenological phenomenon essential to any deep discussion about choice within the context of available freedoms. This stance is less about proving the existence of free will and more about recognizing its indispensable role in conversations on choice. Similar to how one cannot nullify the experience of pain by pointing to its phenomenological roots, dismissing free will on the same basis is equally unfounded. The concept of free will, like the notion of species in biology, might necessitate embracing certain provisional boundaries for the sake of constructive dialogue. These boundaries, though they may appear arbitrary, are foundational for comprehending the broader narrative. This brings us to the common misstep of trying to discredit concepts like love by reducing them to their chemical constituents, a maneuver that fails to grasp the complexity of human experience. Love, and by extension, free will, if they exist, inherently possess a physical basis, with mechanisms that can indeed be dissected and understood. This reality does not diminish their significance but instead anchors them in the tangible world. However, should the lofty metaphysical notion of block-time ever prove to be, well, provable, it may deal a blow to the concept of free will in ways that MRI scans identifying pieces in its causal chain could not.

This does explain why sometimes I have "phantom sensations", I experience these mainly when I'm eating and a piece of food fall and I have the sensation of it hitting my pants but when I look down. Nothing, nada, not a trace. I'm guessing the same logic applies then for phantom pain.

As I watch this, I am reminded of running across the underlying notion of this model in a zen buddhist description of meditation; that our mind is like a mirror that creates its own reflections of reality, and we only ever experience those reflections. As such, our experience is not free of distortions caused by the minds ability to create those reflections. In this light meditation is seen as a practice of having the mind reflect itself and expose its distortions.

Thank for this one Kyle! Now I can get through the rest of my week in guest services by reminding myself that their discontent is simply a perception that only exists in their minds!

There's one thing that happened to me since I was a child that will always stick with me that my brain could never explain. This happened before the Matrix was even released, but I had a situation where I was walking down the street with my parents in my old neighborhood. Everything was normal with nothing extraordinary happening. As we were about to make a turn at the corner of the street, there was this one white house with a clean front lawn at the corner... or so I thought. I turned away from the house to see the tree by my side for some reason... that part I can't recall why I did, but when I turned back to the house, the white house faded into a burgundy coloured house and I saw a box, a thrown away opened bag of chips, and a crushed can like zoom/rushed into placement by the fence of the house, kinda like how that zoom thing happened in Matrix when they loaded things within a scene. That stuck with me as it never made sense to me and I know that garbage was not there as I was walking by. Supposedly my parents I guess didn't see it until the last minute as well as they were telling me to watch my step to not trip over the things when we were practically over it. One of the weirdest situations I've dealt with with a "loading paradox" as I consider it after seeing Matrix.

1:40 dude made me blink manually

At the start of this video, my blinking was completely involuntary and unnoticed - from 2 min on, all of my blinking was 100% voluntary and could not be ignored

Best sponsoring segway ever - so wonderfully topical it hurts. Usually youtubers have to come up with some not so subtile setup - here the content as such set it up and only needed one single sentence to wrap it up, love it although I never ever would have thought I could enjoy a sponsorship segway... 👌😅

I have just awoken, now I'm going back to bed.

This fits really well with my theory about Deja Vu, with this model the brain makes a prediction, receives an input, processes the input, amends the prediction, uploads to our concious mind, this takes a certain amount of time, which the brain takes into consideration (so you're always living slightly in the past, as Kyle has said before). Now imagine that for a brief moment your brain 'overclocked', for some reason it processes things a bit faster than usual, your concious mind isn't used to getting updates so quickly and so it interperates it as happening at different times, at the same time, giving that feeling of having done something before, while you're actually doing it

I read Anil Seth's book "Being You" which presented this model of the mind. It has made sense of so many mental phenomenon in my own life. It makes experience much less "spooky". I think the easiest way to demonstrate to someone that their mental model is not a simple correlation to reality is to tell them about 'Magenta'. It is not a wave-length of light. Then a way to make it more relatable is to bring up those situations where you 'see' something that isn't there. Especially at night when you think you see things, until you turn on the lights. But you still had that fear reaction to it. Your brain was trying to be ready for that *thing*. Even more simply is when you think you see a friend's face on a stranger. That is your brain giving you a missed prediction. You experienced seeing your friend's face for a tiny moment even though they weren't there. We call this out all the time. We say things like "Oh, I thought I saw someone I knew", but really we *did* see them, but then we realized it wasn't really them.

Incredible video! Thank you, Kyle 🎉

Hi Dude! I thoroughly enjoyed your video & just wanted to share that our group of friends from Covington, Georgia have lived our lives by the similar theory that it’s impossible for true facts to exist. The more acceptable term for us is “fact claim.” It all comes from empirical knowledge & thus can never be 100% reliable. We adopted this rather easy to remember outlook in circa 1976 thanks to The Firesign Theatre’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong.” We’ve never deviated from this up until this very nanosecond which according to Gregory Peckory is 4APR24/1848hrs. That’s a long time ago now! Thank you brother!

As an ADHDer with sensory issues, you DON'T want to constantly uncontrollably notice minor details everywhere all the time and how your eyes feel the light, and your skin feels the clothes and the rest of these things. You don't want to feel it even slightly more than a typical human, I promise. You don't want this reality. It's just physically painful and painfully boring, because you actually always notice all the things that supposed to become a background and don't distract you from really important stuff. Enjoy your ability to simply skip everything boring.

Buddhists: "Hey I've seen this one before"

This would explain why so much of my Deja Vu is based in worst case scenarios and then my reality is always relieved when things go well… I also just have anxiety

I first discovered your channel around 5-6 years ago my teacher showed me your one of your videos in my class and he met you in real life at a Disney land, I hope you continue to grow.

This makes a lot of sense when it comes to kids being much more sensitive to stimuli. Their brain can't accurately predict what is about to happen yet, so the brain over responds causes much more experienced stimuli than is really there. Interesting way of thinking about reality and maturing.

Fascinatingly, Buddhism arrived at a strikingly similar idea called cittamatra more than 1,000 years ago through philosophical argument rather than scientific examination. They're not _exactly_ the same thing, but cittamatra posits that the mind manifests or simulates the world we perceive, accounting for sensory data but filtering it through various biases and combining it with assumptions and memories to create something largely distict from ground truth.

So cool to see a video about this! This is my area of research, and there's a lot going on at the moment :)

Finally, now I know why I ran that newly placed stop sign on the road that I've traveled hundreds of times...

I literally experienced this. A few days ago I was sitting at the kitchen table and I felt something on my foot and I thought it was a cat claw from my cat so i so said ow and I thought I felt pain when I looked down. It was my wife's shoe touching my foot. And then the pain stopped immediately

This could explain why some small objects seem to just pop into existence from time to time. My brain is predicting that there isn't a thing there, then sensory input provides enough information for it to update, and thus sudden existence of small things.

This video is amazing! I remember first hearing something similar in the tv show Mentalist. And people say you can't find useful information while scrolling youtube :)

Thatd actually crazy efficient and kinda scary. I just had a mountaimbike trip down the hills, its nuts how fast our brain can adapt to unexpected information when looking at the trail, but I did get caught by supprise a couple of times hitting ruts that I didnt even notice. If our mind is based on a complex MVC system consider me impressed.

This video reminds me ofmy favorite story about a haunted hotel, where people would see a ghostly image in a certain hallway. However, all it took was for someone to come in, look around, and fix a single fan in a vent, for the air pressure to stop causing miniscule vibrations to people's eyes, thus ending any further reports of ghost sightings.

I have loved watching you go from "rando youtube guy" to "discount Chris Hemsworth". Please note that "discount Chris Hemsworth" is a deeply flattering compliment, unless you are Chris Hemsworth.

Originally from your radioactive series and love to see the progression of your channel, I see you being the next Vsauce when he used to be good and informative. Keep it up! you’re going to change the world! This is awesome content!

This predictive model is surely one marvellous thing. Not something that destabilise me. Studying philosophy at university you come across philosophers and thinkers that have outlined the same principle centuries ago. It's nice to see that neuroscience is reaching a point in which they are explaining so many things and so deeply that we have to reconfigure our thoughts about humanity. By the way thank you for your explanation: they are simple, direct and never boring. You get to the point and leave all of us with doubts useful to let us rethink our dimension.

When I stay awake for more than 40h, sometimes I fall asleep into a half awake state... hard to describe. However when I open up my eyes during that, I tend to see a totally different scene than what I should actually see. My desk is a car, im not sitting on an office chair, I'm sitting on the car's windowframe with the window down, my mouse is a sponge, my keyboard a windshield wiper etc. It feels like a state between dreaming and being awake (my brain does calculate a perception and displays it to me, its just *totally wrong* lol). Only lasts for about a few seconds, and its always a completely different scenario, but when I finally snap back into reality I'm like "WOAH WTF WAS THAT LOL". Sleep deprivation is a really easy way to experience full-on hallucinations! And its funny af when experiencing it while gaming with friends, basically waking up in a completely different game, not even realizing I'm playing a game heh. These experiences started 17 years ago, on my way to school in a bus, I didnt rly sleep for days and that made me see trolls & elves walking around outside, while I was tryharding to keep my eyes open. Never taken any drug but alcohol, caffeine, nicotine & cannabis. I imagine a LSD/DMT/shroom trip to be like that (I'm just way too scared to try it, cuz with sleep deprivation you can simply sleep the hallucinations away instantly - unlike the effect of drugs, which can lead to hours of horror tripping). 😅 sry 4 spam, but very interesting topic, perception is fascinating because it's different for all of us. Thank you for this video! 🏆💯

This would help explain the phenomenon of dreams (simulation without much external stimulation ie minimal calibration), which is why it can feel "weird". It's probably like a sandbox for predictive models within us to train and get better or just have fun. And being high on something probably results in a similar thing where your external stimulation gets messed with in a way and you start seeing things, as some even say "transcend dimensions" lol. Perhaps if someone is dedicated enough, they could hallucinate things happening without any substances, such as ghosts or other apparitions, but that is detrimental to existence as we're not accurately simulating what's around us anymore for the sake of our own fantasy and could say trip and fall, yet we might feel it's real to us, which us why some people swear by seeing ghosts. (Or cough ahem, other entities of "higher power") Fascinating stuff and video on it, thanks for covering it!

@11:45 ‘I’m giving you an overview, and a challenge to learn more, if you want to.” Very inspiring message.

Thank you for an update of perspective, Kyle ;)

I don't remember where I first found this thought, it may verywell have been one of your own videos years ago, but I remember being postulated this question and it forever shook the foundation of my perception of reality. "How do you know that the green you see is the same as the green anyone else sees"

I sat in a darkened room for 7 days. After about 1 day, I was seeing blue clouds, pretty much all of the time. After about 4 days, I was seeing blinking white lights in rows, rainbows, and white glares, and a blue light was floating near the bed I slept on. After 5 days, I had trouble going to sleep, because the white lights were on, ALL the time, and closing my eyes didn't do jack, and I was also seeing something that looked like peacock feather patterns everywhere. After about 6 days, my brain was drawing a ceiling over a space I sat in, and I saw long scenes, including seeing flowers and fields made of white light. I think this would happen for pretty much anybody. Just: 1. Go into a pitch dark space. 2. Wait 5 days. 3. Look.

Great video! As I imagined you would, you tapped into several of the topics I learned about while pursuing a degree in cognitive science. Highly recommend a degree in cog sci if you want to question your perception of reality and things like your memories

I covered this in a course I took a few months back, and it makes me wonder if some profs will use this video like I’ve seen them use other videos from you in the past. This is a very concise and simple explanation of the concept and I think people would probably appreciate that.

I’ve been waiting for an Active-Inference/Predictive-Processing pop sci video for so long. I’ve struggled to explain it to others, thank you so muh for creating this, it’s helped me find the words to use to explain the paradigm.

I was already massively questioning my reality today. This...didn't help to reduce that.

1:38 I've said this every few months. It's always "Why can I only notice my blinking when I know of my blinking and then when I try to not notice it to see if I notice it, I don't notice it because I'm not thinking about my blinking?" It bothers me so much.

One time I was startled by an unexpected sound. I had enough time to wonder why I got startled before I a actually perceived the sound as such.

I love how this makes the perception filter or whatever from hitchhikers guide way more plausible. Love this

Computer scientist here. I don't think it is exactly like this, but the brain uses much less sensory information than what has classically thought. You are basically a generative AI, but the input is not exactly random noise but a few sensory hints to guide your perception. You construct the rest. The moment you realize what you have created is not the same with what the input is, you suddenly jump and become alert. Imagine driving a car. So long as the road goes on as you predict, no problem. You can follow the road without realizing you do that. But the moment that your constructed reality does not match, you start to do full processing, switching to an alert state. I think the reason behind this is to conserve energy, shutting down most of the processing while nothing critical going on. Or you might be using that processing to think about something else that is important.

Kyle, I really wish you where the first person to tell me this, but the truth is that I've been questioning reality for far too long, even before social media was a thing. When I finally began learning about the stuff you said in this video, it was actually a relief finding out I wasn't getting crazy alone. Btw, you look terrific.

Love you man. Your videos are so kick ass

Now I can’t stop noticing my blinks and it’s driving me mad

"Man as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses. For example, he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars or of his hearing by electrical amplification. But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes, or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass". C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

My best psychology class was Sensation and Perception and it covered a lot of this in sych mind blowing depth!!

This makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

This is why, as someone who has almost no peripheral vision, my brain simulates it, and it LOOKS as thry I can see, but if it's moved silently and without noticing with my other senses, things csn seemingly teleport... Including people!

Now combine this with the science of people with mental disorders as well as the use of hallucinogens to help treat mental disorders

Your videos are always incredible bro

I've been preaching this since the 90's. I thought it was a quite intuitive way of explaining the world around you.

At 0:47 I was absolutely CONVINCED those were someone else's hands and it was a sight gag.

Guess that's why when people tell me I'm crazy I just say "my reality is just different than yours"

Huh, it's like how some video compression algorithms only send pixels that _change_ rather than entire frames!

Ah! I watched a Royal Institution seminar about this very topic not two weeks ago, and I must say your overview was much more easily digestible. I do like this idea, and hope that we can invent ways to validate it. It has a lot going for it in terms of explanatory power.

This kind of topic can be world-shattering for some people, but for me, the idea that the world isn't what I think it is, or that I'm not what I think I am is wonderful. While studying perception vs. reality, at some point I began to feel like my body was just my body, and less a part of my "self"; the old "ghost in a meat suit" idea. Due to this, I feel like I listen to my body more. Pain was just pain before; now, pain is a direct message from my body telling me that something's wrong; it's my "check engine" light. This is just one of many reasons I dislike using painkillers.

Thankfully, I came up with a trick that allows me to function just fine; I "tricked" myself in believing what I am experiencing is reality. It does not matter if the reality is actually reality or not. I "tricked" myself in believing this reality is reality.

Amazing video, the graph you showed reminds me of and is super similar in the way it functions to the 7 OSI model stacks for network interaction. Kinda wild huh

I tried to explain this multiple times to different classmates from 7th grade thru to now but about deja vu cause one day i was thinking about how overimaginative i was as a kid and was also obsess w superheroes and stuff so i wanted to see if i was psychic or telekenetic etc. And it dawned on me at one point how often we are trying to predict things as individuals and ss groups for fun or work or what have you. And i thought to myself maybe deja vu is the brain just trying to predict the next steps of day to day life or even when we're thinking of tomorrow or even just a lil moment like "is the cashier going to yap too much to me with small talk, god i hate small talk" and then it actually happens & the brain has to double back on the files & the present like woah wait a minute didnt we just do this, or did that just happen?"

I think about this stuff daily. Thinking too much about it isnt too good for your mental health

The brain is watching a video about how it's watching a video explaining how its own way of experiencing things is entirely fabricated yet is helpless in modifying it... but can find a way to stop it entirely.

“You believe the chemicals when they tell you they’re chemicals?” Okay, man😂.

I often avoid the videos you make for the sole fact that I believe they may change my concepts or perceptions of reality, because you do a REALLY good job of elaborating a point. and the thumbnails sometimes scare me /s. However, I must say, this did a good job of being positive mindset wise, and granting a new way of thinking of the self, and for that, thank you!

All this actually clears out and organizes many thoughts I had in mind for a long time. Specifically after reading "hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. Thank you. This makes so much sense to me

I agree with basic premise of the video, to the extent that my understanding of the various aspects can lead me to be. There were a couple of very minor points that I wasn't so sure on so as I tend to do, I have written this comment to help me form the ideas better in my own mind. Blinks = gaps? Another explanation is that you blink so quickly and your brain times your blinks to sink with the “frame rate” of your perception. You can vaguely see the blinks but you tune them out rather than really filling in the visual information. Your eyes take longer than a blink to adjust to sudden light changes so while your eyes are closed the light is still being processed by your retinas. Light when your eyes open again they are immediately filled with light and update the image. We have all experienced blink-and-you-miss-it moments, if unprepared you miss it and are aware that you must have blinked as it happened so we are quite conscious of this gap in our vision. If you expect a blink-and-you-miss-it moment then you will automatically stop yourself from blinking for a short time. I don't think updating the “Do your research” meme to be followed with, “in a school” fixes the problem. People genuinely think that “do your research” is a constructive thing to say without defining what “research” is. Doing some googling and reading some articles is a valid way for your average person to find out more about a subject and that is in a sense, “research” but it’s not expert research and 2 people doing that basic form of research can often come to vastly different conclusions because of the sources they read, which are often a result of both their personal biases and online algorithms which are partially influenced by your own biases. Doing your research in a school means that you are studying the subject formerly but are not necessarily an expert on the topic or how to research things effectively (depending on what the subject is and your education level)

Thanks for helping me reach my daily quota of existential crises today. Now i have more time to completely dissociate!

This makes a lot of sense. Sometimes when I’m about to fall asleep in a dimly lit room I can still perceive the room “as it is/was through my closed eyelids. It’s just my brain buffering expected data.

Watching a chaotic video while having a chaotic day Great…now I have an existential crisis

Experience is not only Top to Bottom. It's also Bottom to Top. The cortical layers are bidirectional and hierarchical. Information flows both directions simultaneously. There is top to bottom prediction and experience with bottom to top error back propagation and synaptic strength reconfiguration going on at the same time and it's taking place continuously. It's our life.

You are one of my all time favorite science and sci-fi communicators

I have not fully trusted my senses since I got on the wrong bus one day. The (small version of the) destination sign above the driver magically "updated" after being told I was on the wrong bus.

Cheers for this one, Kyle. That was genuinely the perfect way to finish up getting ready for work today. Fascinating stuff.

Today's Fact: In 2013, a man in California sold a pair of 19th-century photographs for 2.3 million dollars that he found at a garage sale for 45 dollars.

I remember walking home once and a pair of kids were walking towards me. They had a basketball, and when they were about 20 ft away I started to clearly hear the ball bounce, but I heard the sound when it was at it's peak instead of when it hit the ground.