Anil Seth

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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 he was one of the early proponents of this idea and he indeed called it unconscious inference, which is puzzling because we're talking about a conscious experience.

What Helmholtz was getting at was that

we're not generally conscious of the processes unfolding in our brains that give rise to the conscious experiences that we then have.

Yeah, this is the beautiful thing about all these fun optical illusions, auditory illusions, perceptual illusions of all kinds.

They're little windows into how our perceptual systems actually work.

And I think they really show that our brains, our visual cortex, for example, at the back of the head here, it's not trying to...

accurately record the patterns of light that happen to impinge on the eyes, like a camera does.

It's trying to use the light that comes into the eyes as a way of figuring out what's happening in the world.

So we might then see two lines that look to be different lengths and they turn out to be exactly the same length, but that's because the context might be that, okay, normally that would...

be parts of a three-dimensional object.

Or two patches of color might appear to be different colors, but then you actually look at, you isolate them and look at them individually and they're the same color.

It's the context that means our brains interpret them in a different way.

That's exactly right.

There's kind of a slightly jargony term, but I quite like it.

These illusions are what psychologists would call cognitively impenetrable.

That means even when you know what's going on, you can look at these patches in a checkerboard in isolation, and indeed it's entirely clear that they're exactly the same.

But in the context of the checkerboard,

They're going to always look different.

And I've seen this illusion, I mean, probably well over a thousand times.

And it works just as well as the first time.

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