Skip to main content

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality - Anil Seth

11,178,872 Views

229 Questions Answered

TED Talk

Let’s Begin…

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a 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."

Additional Resources for you to Explore

Watch these recommended TED-Ed Lessons:

How do you know you exist?
How do you know you’re real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist? James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to René Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy.

Who am I? A philosophical inquiry
Throughout the history of mankind, the subject of identity has sent poets to the blank page, philosophers to the agora and seekers to the oracles. These murky waters of abstract thinking are tricky to navigate, so it’s probably fitting that to demonstrate the complexity, the Greek historian Plutarch used the story of a ship. Amy Adkins illuminates Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus.

Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a body?
Our bodies – the physical, biological parts of us — and our minds — the thinking, conscious aspects — have a complicated, tangled relationship. Which one primarily defines you or your self? Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a body? Maryam Alimardani investigates.

What causes hallucinations?
A condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome can cause blind patients to hallucinate scenes in vivid color. fMRI studies show that these hallucinations activate the same brain areas as sight — areas that are not activated by imagination. Other hallucinations also involve the same brain areas as real sensory experiences. What's going on? Elizabeth Cox details the science of hallucinations.

Next Section »

About TED Talk Lessons

TED Talk Lessons are created by TED-Ed using phenomenal TED Talks. Do you have an idea for a lesson? Create it now using any video from YouTube »

Meet The Creators

More from Mind Matters