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 think it's initially very counterintuitive.

We open our eyes and a world appears.

It seems as though...

The world is just objectively out there with all its properties, the colors and shapes and objects and people and places.

And it's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds through our eyes and our ears and our other senses.

And we just see things, perceive things, hear things as they really are.

But that's, I think, a very misleading view of actually how perception works, actually how our experiences of the world and the self are constructed.

Closer to the truth, I think, is that our brains are always actively interpreting the signals that come in to our senses, and not just to slightly nuance or change them.

But think about it this way.

There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world, the reds, the greens, the oranges, and so on.

There is light, there's electromagnetic radiation, but that in itself doesn't have color, just has wavelength.

And our eyes, the cells in our eyes are sensitive to only three of these wavelengths.

And they're short, medium, and long.

We tend to call them red, green, and blue, but they're not.

They're just short, medium, and long.

And out of those three wavelengths, our brains somehow construct millions of different colors that we experience that give our lives texture and meaning and beauty.

And so in some sense, when we experience color, we see both less than what's really there because we only experience or we're only sensitive to three wavelengths of light.

But our experience is also more than what's really there because we can experience millions of different colors, not just three.

And what holds for color, I think, holds for everything else.

The world that we experience comes just as much, if not more, from the inside out than from the outside in.

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