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

So this is the game I think we have to play.

We always have to ask, so what kind of evidence is contained within a specific experience?

And what kind of explanation should we use to account for that experience?

I think it's, yeah, you put it pretty well, I think.

So with psychedelics, one thing that I think worth emphasizing is that another dimension along which experiences can vary is how real they seem.

And again, I think we've got to play the same game.

The fact that something seems real, what is that evidence for?

Is that evidence that the experience is a better reflection of reality?

Or is it evidence that the experience of what is real is also something that the brain is kind of doing?

And in a psychedelic state, it may kind of dial that up a bit sometimes.

Or maybe down, it depends.

When we're dreaming...

normally we experience things as being real.

But in some cases, in lucid dreaming, we know we're dreaming.

And so we experience the dream content as not as real as waking content.

There are people with derealization who perceive the world in the same way in terms of objects and so on as you or I might.

But

But their experiences, if you like, faded a little bit in terms of its reality.

There's this sort of sense that things aren't quite as real as they are for you or me.

And again, I think that's the more interesting account that reality is not an always valid signature of how good our perceptions are in some sense, but it's also something the brain is actively doing.

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