Anil Seth

speaker

1,118 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So we were inspired by this to sort of look, try and create a bit more of a map of how different our inner worlds are, one person to another.

So we did an experiment with around 40,000 people, about 50 different tasks, visual illusions and other things, to try to get a sense of perceptual diversity.

Just what does it look like?

We're all different heights, body shapes, skin colors, and so on.

And it turns out that

We differ on the inside in much the same way.

There's always a distribution.

There's always a kind of me and then things tail off on either side.

And that seems to be true whatever aspect of perception we look at, whether it's the effect of context on color, whether it's how fast we perceive time to go, it's whether we see faces in clouds or not.

Whatever we look at, we see out there distribution.

And I think that's really interesting and it's exactly what you would expect because evolution is all about variability.

We differ and then sometimes it works better, sometimes it doesn't work quite so well, but biological systems in general just always instantiate this kind of variability and that's true for our inner worlds just as it is for our bodies.

In this particular experiment,

You can do some clever things with visual illusions.

You can do things where there's one illusion.

It's called the Ebbinghaus illusion.

And in this illusion, you have two circles, one on the left, one on the right, and each circle is surrounded by some other ones that can either be small or large.

Depending on that, the two circles in the middle can look different sizes, even though they're the same size.

So what we can do is we can have a kind of interactive version of this where the circles start out different sizes and then we have people adjust the circles around the edge until they look the same.

Because we can tell, people can tell.

Showing 181–200 of 1,118 · page 10 of 56