Anil Seth

speaker

170 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

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 Aug 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Gold: How does the brain conjure consciousness? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

But it's quite reasonable.

I think it's quite plausible that all our experiences are different in specific ways, just rather subtly so.

And when we use the same words for our experiences, we tend to assume that we all see the world exactly the same way.

But we don't.

I think it's a very interesting part of it.

And the point that you raise, this idea about how much smiling might relate to happiness, there is, I think, two ways to look at that.

There is a slightly wishy-washy way.

There's this sort of idea that if you stick a pencil in your mouth so that it forces you to smile, then you just feel happier.

That kind of stuff, I think, really is a bit wishy-washy.

But the deeper truth underlying that is how emotion works in general.

And what I explore in the book, and actually a lot of the work that I've been doing over the last 10 years or so, has been trying to understand emotion as a kind of perception too.

It's a very old idea.

It goes back to William James in the 19th century.

But my take on it, my sort of new take on it, is that

Emotion works in just the same way that our perception of the outside world works, too.

It's another kind of controlled hallucination.

When I experience visually a car, a red car across the road, my brain is making a best guess about the causes of all the light that hits my eye.

And best guess is that it's a red car.

When I feel an emotion.

What's happening is that my brain is making a best guess.

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