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.

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

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

That's also something people have been interested in for a while, but we have a large set of data about this now.

We can ask, how does it change in the lifespan?

And in particular, what happens in dementia and Alzheimer's, where people typically focus on memory and how functional people are behaviorally and cognitively, but

comparatively little focus on how the world seems to someone with dementia.

And so this gives us now a way to understand that.

And when we know more about that, we might be able to adapt people's environments so that they're more comfortable for people with dementia or even find ways to diagnose it or maybe even to develop ways to train perception so people can improve in their symptoms.

But the idea of focusing less on what people can do and more on how people experience their worlds, I think opens up a lot of opportunities.

You mentioned a minute ago about a cause of our everyday suffering might be the fact that we take the content of our experiences to just be the way it is and without any possibility, any sort of flex in there.

And I actually think that's right, that the more we understand that our perceptual experience is constructed, that opens a little bit of space for the idea that even if the objective reality doesn't change, our way of relating to it, our way of experiencing it can still change.

And that's ultimately what matters, how we feel about things.

I think that's right.

I think the only thing, the only kind of slight tweak I would add is that, yes, we have our biases, but we can't do without them.

And I think this is sometimes part of the problem.

People aspire to like, well, you know, I don't have any bias.

You know, I just see things as they are, or I believe, you know, the most rational thing that I should in these circumstances.

But the point is that to perceive anything, and I think indeed to believe anything,

We have to have some prior expectation.

We have to have some pre-existing model of what's going on, of how the world works, whether that's how it works politically or how light works when it's bouncing off objects.

We can't get rid of that at all.

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