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

This is the nuts and bolts that actually, this idea of perception being an act of construction is very old.

It goes back in philosophy, in Western philosophy, at least to Immanuel Kant, who talks about these ideas.

And they've evolved and developed slowly.

And these days, it is really about nailing down the mechanisms, what's happening inside our brains.

And the idea that me and my colleagues, we work on is to think of the brain as a kind of prediction machine.

So there are lots of connections coming from the eyes that go into the brain, but there are also many connections going in the other direction from the brain back out towards the senses, the eyes and the ears.

And I think the best way

theory about what's happening these days is that the brain is able to make predictions about the sensory signals that are coming in.

It's able to make predictions a bit more precisely.

It's making predictions about their causes.

And the sensory signals that come in, they aren't read out by the brain to form like an inner movie, but rather the sensory signals are used to calibrate and update the predictions.

So we have predictions that come, if you like, from the top down or the inside out.

And this flow of predictions is continually meeting an inward flow of sensory signals, which mainly tell the brain the difference between what it's expecting to get and what it actually gets.

And so it's continually calibrating this difference.

And then the claim is that what we perceive is much more down to the predictions than the sensory signals.

So what we perceive as the brain's best guess of what's going on.

In this view, the brain is solving a problem in maths that we call Bayesian inference.

It's trying to infer what the most likely state of the world is, given the information that it gets through the senses, and importantly, given the brain's

prior expectations if you like about how the world works and what's going on some of these are learned so we may learn to perceive things in different ways some of them are just sort of installed from the beginning like we our brain knows how shadows work our brain knows that light usually comes from above because light typically always came from above so we have within our brains a kind of

model of the world.

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