Thousands of years before anyone understood the brain and the mechanics of perception, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with his famous Allegory of the Cave to represent how humans think about and perceive reality and truth. In the allegory, prisoners spend their whole life chained up in a cave, facing a wall with a fire at their back. Many objects, animals, and people pass in front of the fire behind them and cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners see these shadows and give each form different names. Eventually, a prisoner is released from the cave,…
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Now that we understand a little bit about the complicated architecture of the brain, we can finally start to appreciate the beautiful complexity of the world it creates. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is filtered through the lens of the brain, refracted through our thoughts and past experiences, and reconfigured to create our unique perception of reality. Because of this complicated system of translating sensation to perception, we never really interface directly with reality. Most of the time, the image that perception creates is fairly accurate—or at least we mostly agree on it. But like any complicated…
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