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

It's a good question because I don't know the answer.

And I mean, I suppose what I could say is that it...

the psychedelic intervention is not something we were evolved to deal with.

So you're really putting the brain in a state, which is kind of unusual.

Like, I don't really buy that there's some theories out there.

Stoned ape theory?

Stoned ape theory, for instance, that this sort of... Because of mushrooms, we, the apes... Right, there's some sort of essential psychedelic component to how our minds and brains evolve.

Maybe there's some small component that I don't know.

But...

Most of the time, our perceptual systems work pretty well about distinguishing what's real from what's not.

If I think of an image in my mind, I don't immediately confuse it with something happening in the world.

This is another dimension that people vary in, by the way, how vivid their inner mental imagery is.

This has been known for a long time.

Some people claim to have no inner mental imagery.

We call that aphantasia.

Other people have hyperphantasia.

Their mental images are very vivid.

But even for those people, you don't really confuse your imagination with reality.

So I think evolution's done a pretty good job of having perceptual experiences distinguish between reality and imagination.

But yeah, you can mess them up.

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