One neuroscientist’s deep dive into perception and reality

How do you know you exist

Seeing, hearing, loving, fearing, dreading, dreaming, imagining. Those are all different types of conscious experience

When I see something or hear something, my supposition is, of course, that this is reality

But it's not reality. All we see and all we hear and all we touch, etc.

is always mediated through our senses and through our brains. that is very much different in each individual

We live inside this perception box, all of us. And so when something changes in a transformative experience

and you expand the world of your perception box, you interpret it differently from before

so you sort of become more curious. You believe you have agency. You believe you can make a difference in the world

And that is a much more positive attitude, a much more adaptive, beneficial attitude to people

where they're more content and more at ease and more comfortable with themselves and more home in the world

Hi, I'm Christoph Koch. I'm a brain scientist, and I'm both a chief scientist

of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, as well as meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle

I study consciousness in people and in animals. From a medical point of view, consciousness is defined as awareness of self and others

and arousal. What that means, they're basic mechanisms in my brainstem that are absolutely

necessary for me to be conscious They don provide any of the content of consciousness You don love or dream or fear or dread with your brainstem That really seems to be in us the outermost layer of the brain which is the most excitable piece of active matter

in the known universe, the neocortex. Most people are what we call naive realists

They assume that what they see or hear, that's actually what's out there

That is the reality. Now, that may be true for certain things, like, you know, we can all agree

Right now we're sitting inside a room. Nobody believes that we're in a desert or that we're in virtual reality, right

We're all in a room. There's white paper on the ground, et cetera, et cetera. So that's consensual reality

But the fact is people fundamentally reinterpret things very, very differently. For example, the sense of color

There was a striking phenomena that went viral, I think, 2015 called the dress

Hashtag the dress, right? Where there was this picture of a dress that was striped

and half of the people, including me, saw it unambiguously gold and white

Roughly the other half of humanity insisted that it's blue and black. Now, I believe they're all delusional

but it's a playful example how the same reality can appear very, very different to people

And so we constantly make these unspoken assumptions. It's very difficult to realize, well, this is what I assume about people

This is what I assume about the world. This may not necessarily be true. People in different cultures have sort of explicitly, implicitly devised a whole set

of different ways to enable people sort of to be open and curious to the world in the

language of perception box to expand their world. This includes education first and foremost understanding that everyone sees the world slightly differently Not everyone smells and hears and tastes things in the same way Learning about other cultures that we all carry biases and they unconscious

which means you don't know that you're biased. Developing good habits by doing things like reading books, watching movies, talking to other people

Yoga, mindfulness, being in the here and now. These are all traditional, reasonable, well-understood ways to sort of enlargen your perception box

We all live in what I call in the gravitational field of planet ego

just like we always live in the gravitational field of the planet Earth, right

Now, there are certain conditions when we can begin, just like an astronaut becomes weightless and floats

when we can lose a self. Literally, we become selfless. When you go into a state of flow, for example

when you are used to be able to do this when I did computer programming, you can totally lose everything around you and you're just fully immersed in your program

when you do meditation under certain types of psychedelics. I had a mystical experience sitting up late on a beach

where whatever remained of me became one with the universe. I know it sounds all very woo-woo crazy, but that's what my experience was

At my age, typically, the way you think about the universe and the metaphysics of what really exists is pretty firmly established

but it was like an earthquake. has really fundamentally shifted the tectonic plates

of my understanding. Ultimately, the perception box is instantiated in the brain

by the wiring among neurons. That's where sort of the rubber hits the road

And because of your experience, your perception box has changed. It resets your mind You can reinterpret your experiences and look at the same facts in a different light And if you can take that knowledge back into your everyday life you feel content

You feel in the world. Take the words nowhere. So many of us are nowhere because we're constantly in our phone

So the opposite of mindfulness, we're constantly, okay, she said, now I have to reply to this, I have to like or not like it, whatever

Then you look at the same word nowhere and you pass it differently

Now here. And now you're here. Now I say, okay, now I'm focused

I'm here in my body. Losing ourselves in these artifacts, we all know that's not a good habit

It leads to estrangement from interoception, the ability for us to feel at home inside our body

So it's important to get out there in the world and do things. We want people to be open to the world

We want people to be curious. We want people to understand it's not always about you

It's okay if your ego is out of it. I don't have to have this attitude

I have a choice. I can make difference. And suddenly I can look at the same facts and come to a very different conclusion

When you lose a sense of self, when you see I'm just one among many individuals

or many conscious beings, you develop empathy, you develop positive feelings for other creatures

that may have different goals than you that look at the world in different ways

but we're all engaged in the same voyage, you know, bookended between two eternities