The big idea: do we all experience the world in the same way?

all perception is based on how the brain is wired from our experiences in the past. We don’t perceive things in our reality the way they are; we perceive reality the way we are.

If one had to characterise the difference overall, is something like this. Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow and one can never step into the same river twice– Heraclitus’s phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of t

The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation. This happened when you simulated the bee in chapter 2; once you’d seen the full photograph, your brain had a new experience to draw on, so it could instantly construct a be

Perception, the neuroscientist Anil Seth writes, is “a generative, creative act.” It is “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality.” Or as the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett notes, “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the