How Strong Feelings Can Mislead Us About Truth |
Perceptions that seem obviously true are, at best, only partial reflections of reality.
We feel good when we perceive what we expect to perceive but upset when our expected perceptions are wrong.
Feelings are fallible guides to knowing that our perceptions are true.
Normally, it seems like we see the world the way it really is—that our perceptions of the world correspond accurately to reality. But how do we know that our perceptions are really true?
Research by Anil Seth suggests that the brain constantly predicts what we are going to see next, and as long as those predictions match incoming sensory information, our sense is that we are seeing the world the way it really is. All of the colors, shapes, sounds, and movements of objects that we sense are perceived to be "out there" as real features of the environment, not figments of our imagination.
However, neuroscience tells us a different story, that everything we perceive to be "out there" is actually a fictional construction of the brain, a way of interpreting the world that helps us to deal with the environment but not literally reflecting external reality.
The biologist Jakob von Uexküll used the term Umwelt to refer to an animal's........