Are You Living a Controlled Hallucination? How Your Brain Creates Reality
Your brain doesn’t just receive reality — it predicts and constructs it, sometimes leading to surprising illusions.
Imagine standing in a forest, heart racing, rifle raised, convinced you see armed enemies — only to realize it’s a boy leading cows. This startling moment reveals a profound truth: your brain constructs your reality.
Your brain receives ambiguous, incomplete sensory data and uses past memories and body signals to predict what you are experiencing. Perception is thus a carefully controlled hallucination, mostly accurate but sometimes prone to errors like illusions or false alarms.
Moreover, your brain initiates actions based on these predictions before you become consciously aware. This has profound implications for understanding free will and behavior, showing that unconscious processes prepare your body for survival.
These insights reshape how we think about responsibility, decision-making, and change. While impulses may arise unconsciously, you can influence future predictions through learning and mindfulness.
Explore further with research from Yale on brain prediction, MIT Press on brain networks, and Elsevier on brain function and consciousness. 1 2 4
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