You are hallucinating right now to make sense of the world - NEUROSCIENCE

...beyond our perceived thoughts of reality, there lies a world of 'perfect forms…Reality as we know it is just an imitation; a copy of these perfect forms  -Plato believed that and if you read his Theory of Forms you'll have a few questions as well regarding our perception of the world.

What are hallucinations?
Hallucinations are sensations that appear real but are not elicited by anything in our external environment. They aren’t only visual – they can be sounds, smells, even experiences of touch.

Understanding what is happening in the brain during hallucinations reveals how we’re having them all the time and how they shape our perception of reality.

A bewildering and often very frightening experience in some mental illnesses is psychosis – a loss of contact with external reality. This often results in a difficulty in making sense of the world, which can appear threatening, intrusive and confusing. Psychosis is sometimes accompanied by drastic changes in perception, to the extent that people may see, feel, smell and taste things that are not actually there – so-called hallucinations. These hallucinations may be accompanied by beliefs that others find irrational and impossible to comprehend.

But a team of researchers based at Cardiff University and the University of Cambridge explore the idea that hallucinations arise due to an enhancement of our normal tendency to interpret the world around us by making use of prior knowledge and predictions.

In order to make sense of and interact with our physical and social environment, we need appropriate information about the world around us, for example the size or location of a nearby object. However, we have no direct access to this information and are forced to interpret potentially ambiguous and incomplete information from our senses. This challenge is overcome in the brain – for example in our visual system – by combining ambiguous sensory information with our prior knowledge of the environment to generate a robust and unambiguous representation of the world around us.

For example, when we enter our living room, we may have little difficulty discerning a fast-moving black shape as the cat, even though the visual input was little more than a blur that rapidly disappeared behind the sofa: the actual sensory input was minimal and our prior knowledge did all the creative work.

“Vision is a constructive process – in other words, our brain makes up the world that we ‘see’,” explains first author Dr Christoph Teufel from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. “It fills in the blanks, ignoring the things that don’t quite fit, and presents to us an image of the world that has been edited and made to fit with what we expect.”

“Having a predictive brain is very useful – it makes us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and complex world,” adds senior author Professor Paul Fletcher from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. “But it also means that we are not very far away from perceiving things that aren’t actually there, which is the definition of a hallucination."
Journal article:http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13401.abstract

PR:http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-hallucinations-emerge-from-trying-to-make-sense-of-an-ambiguous-world

Interesting reading via New Scientist - article behind a paywallhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-400-you-are-hallucinating-right-now-to-make-sense-of-the-world/

Plato's Theory of Forms - Read & Learnhttp://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/platform.htm

Image via Google Image search.
Corina Marinescu