Is the world we realize around us just an illusion ?!

Since we would like to talk about the nature of our world whether it is real or deep illusion, let us start with a simple experiment; contemplate the attached form, those lines seem clearly inclined unambiguously, but what if you know that they are - in fact - completely parallel? Do you question this information? Well, you can use a ruler to make sure it's perfectly parallel without a single mistake. You can also try to cover the dividers between the parallel lines with any photo editing program.   

The world is as it is

This is one of the forms of what we call a "cafe wall illusion (1)", but the most striking is undoubtedly "chess board illusion (2)", designed by Edward Edison, professor of optics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s, in which one can acquire Chess board squares are only a different color depending on their position on the board, meaning that there are two squares of the same color, your eyes will see them in two different colors because of their different position! (Watch the attached video and design).

Philosophers use optical illusions for several purposes. For example, to justify the difference between a person seeing something and “seeing it as”, meaning that we can see that there is a difference between seeing something and getting to know it, but what is most striking is no doubt when we consider the reason that leads us to see things other than they really are, in that The point can be started with a simple question: Can you notice the movement of your eyes when you move between things in front of you?

Our eyes move on average four times per second, if we imagine that our eyes are a camera that takes four pictures every second, and it really is, there is a very small time distance between each image you take, we mean during that movement from right to left for example, where You go that far? And why does the world seem clear to us that it does not move and we do not notice any separations between the movements of our eyes between its components?

Flying balls

Let's look at what we call “the stopped clock illusion.” Certainly, it happened once that you moved your eyes to notice that clock suspended on the wall, and you were probably always surprised that at the moment you look at the second hand, Just at that moment, it looks as if the second hand has stopped working for a while. 

The reason is that, during the transfer of your eyes to the second hand, your brain holds a very special thread and connects the two pieces of reality - the previous and the next - so the scene in front of you becomes complete, it happens unconsciously, but because there is already a period of time that passed during the transfer of your eyes to the second hand, It is a very small period during which the brain does not receive any data, as it adds it directly to the next scene, so it seems as if the second hand has stopped for a while.

To better understand this point, let's go to the South Korean city of Busan. We are now in May of 2012, very close to that historic moment in which the famous Australian player Samuel Groth set a new record that no one has managed to break today. Where he launched his transmission in one of the strikes in the Busan professional tennis tournament at 263 km per hour (4), which means that in only a third of that ball can the Grot go across the entire tennis court, which is a huge speed for a car on the highway For example, as well as for the human brain.

We know that the speed with which the electrochemical signals flow in our bodies (5) is about 430 kilometers per hour, which leaves us about a tenth of a second to complete a cognitive process such as vision, meaning that in order to realize the presence of something in front of you, that sentence that you read now, for example, it needs to be At least one to ten seconds for the neurons receiving the light signals to form an image of the sentence and transfer it to their brain regions of consciousness. 

The problem that Grooth's opponent faces in that match is that - to realize that there is a sending ball coming towards him - he needs a ten-second period, but in that short period, with a simple calculation, we find that the ball will have traveled a full 7 meters, which means that it will be She reached him before realizing her existence, so how can he repel her ?!

In the same way that the brain just used a second hand in the case of the second hand, in his book "The Brain: The Story of You", David Egelman, an American neuroscientist from Stanford University, explains this idea by saying that our human brain knows that there is A difference between the event and its awareness, therefore, this player on the opposite side of the tennis court will jump, physically, before the ball reaches him to hit it, but he will not hit it at its location, but in the location expected to reach it after ten seconds, it happens unconsciously, an opponent Growth will not realize that, because our brain does not know the "present" in the understandable sense, but it prompts you to deal with its expectations that Here it is. 

Bayesian brain

Our brains are locked inside a skull, more like a dark cave, communicating with the outside world through sensory tools, such as touch, hearing and sight, but you mistakenly think that the function of the brain is to read this reality only as it is precisely up to a number of photons or sound waves, as if it prints a file sheet. Word "or just takes a picture and prints it inside as it is, except that the brain's job is not to present reality, but to interpret it in an easily digestible image.

To understand this idea in greater depth, we can consider the hypothesis developed by Hermann von Helmholtz (6), the German physician, physicist and mathematician, about two centuries ago when he said that the brain is a "guessing machine", in a clearer sense, what we realize about the world is not the world itself, Rather, our brain’s best guess of this world brings us back to visual illusions. When you look at the visual illusions that we previously presented, the coming visual information for your brain confirms that the boxes “A” and “B” have the same color, and confirm that the two lines are parallel, but your brain does not try to rely on that data individually, but rather uses its experiences to create an integrated image that explains Reality, and sometimes his guess predominates data coming from abroad.

The idea of ​​Hermann von Helmholtz is evolving contemporary to become what is called the "Bayesian brain hypothesis (7)", to imagine that one of them lived in a dark cave throughout his life, and his parents were followers of conspiracy theory and were terrified of an upcoming nuclear war and decided to keep it away in the forests surrounding the city, Then, for some reason, a part of this cave collapsed, so our friend went out to the world and saw, for the first time in his life, the day of the earth. It is a magical incredible scene. Our friend hoped that this would happen again and he would enjoy it as much as possible.

With the sunrise and then sunset on the first day, our friend had a 50% chance that the sun will return to sunrise tomorrow, because he does not know anything about the future of such a thing, and then it actually happened that the sun shone on the next day, so he assured him to some degree that the sunrise It is an ongoing process, and each additional day was an additional update of information that confirms that the sun will continue to shine every day, of course that is not entirely certain, but the odds of the opposite occurring are too small to be concerned with the matter.

The probability in this case, which is called Bayesian statistics (8), expresses a certain degree of belief in an event, a belief that can change as new information is added. Initially, this person believed that everything was possible, but little by little he developed A conviction - based on the experience I gradually gained - says that the sun will rise tomorrow, that is also, according to that hypothesis, what is happening in your brain. For example, when you wear a new watch the same thing happens, its weight in your hands remains a feeling you notice for a while, but over time your brain adds the watch hold in your hands to its experience little by little. 

They are agreed upon

Our brains are guess machines, it is done potentially with the participation of 90 billion brain cells, that is its best mechanism for adapting to this world, in fact you cannot easily realize the massive adaptive capabilities of our brains, but for a close understanding let's imagine that you wore (9) very special glasses You put optical lenses that cause everything below to turn up and back, in which case you will look in front of you to find everything upside down, your friend who is talking to you with his head down and feet up, the bed on top, and the lamps on the ceiling below.

For a moment, you think that you can never wear glasses like this on your eyes, you will stumble immediately and fall to the ground, this is really what will happen in the first days of wearing the glasses, but after two weeks of wearing them you will be able to ride a bike and draw, and with time you will be able to write, happen This is because not only information coming from outside determines your cognitive abilities, but your brain uses the experiences it has developed over your entire life to interpret that information in a holistic, easily digestible way. 

Imagine that the brain is a skilled engineer, making the structure of a huge building that depends on the rules of time, place, pressure, strength, etc. in this world. Your brain changes in that structure based on the data entering it, but it remains an entire structure whose parts are consistent together. From this point of view, the goal of the brain is not to obtain information, the goal is to create a reality that is easily perceived and to remove what is inconsistent with it.

On that point, let's consider one of the most famous - and surprisingly - cases of cognitive delusions, it is what we call the "McGurk Effect" (10), which indicates that what we hear is influenced by what we see, you may be surprised, you often feel that there is this clear cut Between sight and hearing, if someone - as you will notice in the attached video - spoke the word "Bar" regularly and then watched his lips move like someone uttering the word "Bar" then we realize that this is the word "Bar", it's simple, but when the word itself is pronounced as the movement changes Lips of the spokesperson, as if to pronounce the word "Far", you will hear "Far". Do you want to confirm this? Close your eyes as the speaker's lips appear to say "Far."

This happens because our brains, as we talked a few times ago in the case of optical illusions, always try to guess the best possible full picture of the scene, if there is a conflict, and this conflict is within a group of less possibilities, it may displace it directly, although the spoken word is definitely "Bar", and you have entered through your ear to your brain like this, it will perceive "Far", despite the real data!

Well, it must be really interesting and wondering, what we see around us is simply nothing but our brain’s way of explaining what is really around us in a form that we can easily digest, but even though what we realize is not reality, it cannot Never to fully realize the reality that is there out there, what we realize is the closest thing to a distorted reality that we all agree on!