TED : Ideas worth spreading

Review: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

Speaker: Anil Seth
TED2017
Date: April 2017
Location: Vancouver, BC

Description from TED website:
Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any 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.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

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My Review / Notes / Thoughts

So this talk was a bit harder for me to wrap my thoughts around. It made sense and didn’t make sense at the same time … does that make sense?

Anyway, he mentions several fields of study in this talk that provide us with a good starting list of fields of study that might can leverage this talk!

  • Neuroscience
  • Physics
  • Virtual Reality
  • Mathematics
  • Psychiatry
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Neurology
  • Computer Science

These are the fields he listed on screen that are the different disciplines that work at his lab at the University of Sussex. However, I am sure that there are more fields of study that could benefit from analyzing, dissecting, and discussing this talk.

What does this talk mean for those who study mythology? What about theology? Does it affect the studies of sociology or anthropology? How about political science or international studies?

He mentioned several medical fields of study … how might it affect someone learning physical therapy and the way the brain predicts pain? Could this be leveraged to reduce pain in patients going through physical therapy? What types of studies could graduate-level students do to prove/disprove this concept?

Here’s another thought … what does this mean for music? For the person listening? For the person playing the instrument? Does it even come into play in this realm?

Can I just say my head is spinning with different fields of study that this talk might be used with?

I would love to hear your thoughts! What fields of study can you see using this talk with? What types of assignments/activities would you pair with it?


Until next time … live long, life-learner!