Who is Anil Seth?

“A good way to study a phenomenon is to see what happens when it disappears.”

“Anesthesia is a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects and back again into people.”

“Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.”

“In our daily life we are constantly filling in the blanks to try and make sense of things.”

“Upset and resentment are a reflection of our own thoughts and can, therefore, never be caused by anyone or anything outside of ourselves. ”

“We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature.”

“We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in, in a process hardly different from that which we casually call hallucination. Indeed, in a way, we're always hallucinating. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.”

“We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.”