Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. | Quanta Magazine

The debate over “is it real or fake” is somewhat ironic, because so much of what we experience as reality even within our own bodies is actually simulation.

When we examine consciousness up close, it starts to look a bit like the quantum realm. Memories pop in and out of our minds like subatomic particles. Images and sounds tunnel through our senses. Perception, we find, is suffused throughout with uncertainties that would make Heisenberg blush. There's no denying that the brain is up to some pretty sl

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The brain is continually making predictions about the causes of the sensory information it receives, and it uses that information to update its predictions. In other words, we live in a “controlled hallucination” that remains tied to reality by a dance of prediction and correction, but which is never identical to that reality.