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

I would still see this face with eyes, with a nose, with ears and so on.

And that's because...

What a face is, is something that all my ancestors and all your ancestors going back a very long way have had to deal with.

We're a very social species.

We care about faces a lot.

So the memory of what counts as a face is not something that you or I just developed individually over a lifetime.

It's how our brains have evolved.

What this means in practice is that...

we have quite a bit of pre-installed memories about how the world works.

And then there are other things that we learn during our lifetimes.

So if you think about wine tasters,

No one is born, well, maybe some French people are, I don't know, but no one is born being able to tell the difference between two Cabernet Sauvignons.

But you can learn to tell the difference.

And this isn't just wine.

This is kind of anything that we care about, pay attention to.

So we'll learn to discriminate things that previously seemed the same.

And those, if you like, lifetime memories for perception that we can develop

And then there's the very immediate memory, like what happened yesterday.

And typically that won't really impact very much on what we perceive.

But in some cases it might.

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