You Fillet my Senses, Like a Magnetic Greyfield #21 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

Our senses keep us alive, but they don’t tell the truth. And can diverge to hold different realities in the same body.

Total Words

1,219

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. Reality is shaped by our perceptions and can be easily confused.
  2. Evolution has given us the ability to see things that aren’t there.
  3. Our perceptions are subject to alteration, influenced by factors like evolution and sensory variations.
  4. Splitting the corpus callosum can lead to differences in perception and even personality between the brain hemispheres.
  5. This suggests that reality is subjective and can vary, even within the same body.

About Will Knott:

A nerd who usually asks questions and changes things.

Contacting Will Knott:

You can contact Will via Bluesky, Mastadon and LinkedIn.

By Will Knott

Reality is an agreement based on our perceptions, barely. But we can confuse our senses.

The image above is a “Necker Cube”. It’s a simple line drawing of the edges of a cube. But is the square on top the front or the back? Look at it, and watch it flip to the front and the back over and over while you observe it. Your experience changes, but the image does not. Which one is “real”?

The ability of your brains to see non-existent monsters hiding in a bush is an evolutionary advantage… The cautious monkey survived better than the reckless one. Just ask the mice (1). The effect is seeing things that are not there. Also our perceptions are incomplete and can be altered.

By altered, I’m not speaking about imbibing interesting chemicals (not even on unusual mushrooms found on a geology tour), I’m talking about evolution.  You cannot see in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. At least most of you can’t. Aphakia (2) is a condition in which the crystalline lens is absent from the eye, which results in blurry vision, and ultraviolet light not being filtered from the eye. So some people have something in common with insects and reindeer (3). Others of you are colour blind. Either way, the agreed definition of “red” can be disputed for varying degrees of red apples.

Perceptions are not reality. “Red” is a convention that gets disagreed with the further you drift away from the central FF0000 point. There is no agreed edge to hot, cold, bitter or sweet.

And you can experience a world of no colour. Hemi-achromatopsic via transcranial magnetic stimulation near the V4 area of the left hemisphere to cause temporary impairment, will cause your red apple you are looking directly at, to have the colour drained away from its right hand side and fade to grey until you stop the impairment. (4) (If you stimulate it, things just get trippy).

Our senses have evolved to tell us what we need, not to tell the truth. It’s not unfair to think that our senses speak to us in metaphor. It’s a desktop interface hiding the command line processing that exists in the microscopic and the macroscopic fields, while we toil in the emotional ones. However we still need to treat the interface seriously.

Bitter exists to inform us of potential poison. Fitness beats truth, because it lies enough to use proxies to keep us alive, even if you like lemons. And colour interpretation is an indicator of ripeness, or warnings.

Brain mappings, or mis-mappings lead to synesthesia. This is the “condition” where your senses are mixed up due to overlapping brain processing areas. Sounds have shape or colour. Numbers have flavour. These people have different interfaces to reality, but its not an impairment. (interesting for brain mappings, the part of the brain that processes nerve feedback from the genitals are beside the area that processes nerve feedback from the toes 5). We do not have a formula to calculate our experience of tasting an apple. But butchers can sometimes discover things, frequently the discovery of the brain control areas occur while the brain is open for other reasons.

Joseph Bogen and Philip Vogel earned the nickname “the West Coast butchers” as they intentionally, and with care sliced the brain of Bill Jenkins in half in the February of 1962. And Jenkins quality of life improved. In the decade that followed, they split brain after brain. Each person they operated on suffered from severe and intractable epilepsy. Their logic was that the seizures were due to a car crash of signals in their brain, and by performing a corpus callosotomy the collision of neural activity was halted.

When the callosum is cut, the hemispheres can no longer consult themselves and come to an agreement. If Bill closes his left eye and is shown the word “key” and is handed a bowl of objects to pick with his left hand and is told to pick out the object he read, he could pick out a key. With his left hand however, no idea. Show only his right eye the word “ring”, and we would pick out a ring with his right hand, even if he could have picked up the key. The left brain keeps secrets from the right brain. (6)

So one half of the brain is determining reality differently. It can continue to the point where each half develops personality differences. This can reach the point where one side is an atheist while the other is devout. (7)

If reality is able to be distinctly perceived in one body with the same history and genetics, then the closest we can have is just an agreement.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

Toxoplasma gondii makes mice bravely reckless

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphakia

Usually caused by a cataract operation, or trauma. However it does occasionally occur during foetal development.

3 https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/vision/2017/what-can-animals-sense-that-we-cant-071317

What Can Animals Sense That We Can’t?

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex#V4 The V4 area

Desimone, R., Schein, S. J., Moran, J., and Ungerleider, L. G. 1985. “Contour, color and shape analysis beyond the striate cortex,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4024463/#:~:text=The%20corticocortical%20pathway%20from%20striate,inferior%20temporal%20cortex%20(IT)  Vision Research 25: 441-52; Desimone, R., and Schein, S. J. 1987. “Visual properties of neurons in area V4 of the macaque: Sensitivity to stimulus form,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3559704/  Journal of Neurophysiology 57: 835-68; Heywood, C. A., Gadotti, A., and Cowey, A. 1992. “Cortical area V4 and its role in the perception of color,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1403100/  Journal of Neuroscience 12: 4056-65; Footnote taken from “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes” by Donald D. Hoffman.

Desimone, R., Schein, S. J., Moran, J., and Ungerleider, L. G. 1985. “Contour, color and shape analysis beyond the striate cortex,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4024463/#:~:text=The%20corticocortical%20pathway%20from%20striate,inferior%20temporal%20cortex%20(IT)  Vision Research 25: 441-52; Desimone, R., and Schein, S. J. 1987. “Visual properties of neurons in area V4 of the macaque: Sensitivity to stimulus form,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3559704/  Journal of Neurophysiology 57: 835-68; Heywood, C. A., Gadotti, A., and Cowey, A. 1992. “Cortical area V4 and its role in the perception of color,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1403100/  Journal of Neuroscience 12: 4056-65; Footnote taken from “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes” by Donald D. Hoffman.

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain

“Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind” by  V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

6 http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/70s/173-1973.pdf

Sperry, R.W. 1974. “Lateral specialization of cerebral function in the surgically separated hemispheres”

7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvf4seEFtnY

The Curious Case of the People With Split Brains

8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64

Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist

November 7, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

If Reality is Perception – What Else Can We Not See #3 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

We largely experience and interpret reality through our senses but what energy fields exists beyond these, how can we access them and what do they mean.

Total Words

941

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. Our senses and the brain interpretation help from our reality
  2. We are surrounded by energy fields
  3. These energy field could change our sense of reality
  4. We are still evolving

About Eoin Kennedy:

Ex teacher, marketing lecturer, startup founder, PR professional, events organiser, digital marketing head and currently working as a content strategist.  The slave behind CongRegation.

Contacting Eoin Kennedy:

You can follow Eoin on Twitter,  connect with him on LinkedIn or, email him.

By Eoin Kennedy

Sometime around 1674 Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the first man to make and use a real microscope, became the first person to observe bacteria and protozoa .  This might not seem like a ground breaking event but similar to the first viewings through a telescope it revealed entirely new worlds we did not know existed and changed our perception about reality.

Much of what we believe is real is directly connected to what we perceive and much of what we perceive is through our senses.  The Berkely Greater Good project defined it even further “What we perceive in any given moment is not only determined by sensory input, but by our personal physical abilities, energy levels, feelings, social identities, and more.”

Simplistically our perception of reality is formed by a muscle inside a bone casing that depends on inputs from our sensory organs – taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch amongst other contested senses.

These sensory organs are unreliable, can be easily fooled plus they are quite limited.   Some animals for example can detect forms of energy invisible to us, like magnetic and electrical fields .

It would also appear that our senses and perception system might be blinkered in order to protect us or keep us focused on our more core function or put more succinctly by Jay van Bavel at New York University “The main goal of the perceptual system is to keep the brain alive, so you can pass on your genes,”

Let is also consider the claim that we only use 10% of our brains (this figure is hotly contested and criticised)  but with training our brains can perceive things that are otherwise relatively invisible so logically it stands that there energy fields or other phenomenon around us that could change our sense of reality.  At its simplest what would change if we could experience what animals can like sharks being able to detect electric fields, snakes seeing thermal images,  reindeers seeing ultra violet light, birds seeing extra colours, elephants with infrasonic sounds and Honey bees ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field.

But what if there was more.   And if so how would we access it and also how might we evolve further in the future to do so.

Various religions has long relied on storytelling about spirits and energy fields that exist around even though we have little proof.  Could hallucinogenic drugs or entering trance like states where people report experiencing spirit guardians who guide them be real or simply altered dreams.  Ceremonies with the drug ayahuasca are rough experiences and its unclear are they opening up access to energy fields or simply deeply resetting the brain and allowing people to view deeper in to the mirror?

If everything is energy it holds that we are surrounded by energy.  Frequently this is translated as the presence of spirits.

Unfortunately despite lots of theories there is little tangible evidence and proof.  However we have all had that six sense of something positive or negative when we enter a certain room or a premonition of something to come.

There are also plenty of Out of Body stories especially near death experience ones.  Frequently these feature being to see/experience events in other rooms normally during operations or even being clinically dead. Science explains some of these as an output of the brain.

Personally I believe that our brains and sensory inputs are still at a pretty primitive stage of evolution.  Taking this a bit further there are energy fields flowing around us that in future we may be able to detect (either through enhancements or biological evolution) and equally in the future we will be able to interpret these energy fields.  I don’t see this as being able to see our dead parents but rather the core energy that once formed them but disintegrated once they died.

Currently we are very poor at both perceiving and understanding energy fields but acknowledging that we do not know everything and being open to new thinking and curious in our pursuit of knowledge could be to our benefit.  It has served us well in the past.  In Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens he explains that what distinguished the European powers from other similar empires and lead to their almost global dominance was their embrace of ignorance and the desire to overcome it.  In this case it was seeking out distant lands and conquering them but the principle is probably reasonably similar.

We appear to be at a meeting point where quantum physics/multiverse theories seem to be intersecting with and almost validating Shamanism and more simplistic religious beliefs, that have long been ridiculed.  The evidence might already be there but we cannot process it using our currently understanding of what we believe is real.

For certain there is much more to know and understand about our reality and we should not just trust what our senses tell us.  Afterall we could just be stuck in a computer generated matrix.

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October 18, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet