Our Reality Depends On What Our Biology

When A Male Vole Repeatedly Mates With A Female, A Hormone Called Vasopressin Is Released In His Brain. The Vasopressin Binds To Receptors In A Part Of The Brain Called The Nucleus Accumbens, And The Binding Mediates A Pleasurable Feeling That Becomes Associated With That Female. This Locks In The Monogamy, Which Is Known As Pair-bonding. If You Block This Hormone, The Pair-bonding Goes Away.

If Our Brains Were Simple Enough To Be Understood, We Wouldn't Be Smart Enough To Understand Them.

Awareness Of Your Surroundings Occurs Only When Sensory Inputs Violate Expectations. When The World Is Successfully Predicted Away, Awareness Is Not Needed Because The Brain Is Doing Its Job Well.

The Brain "fills In" The Missing Information From The Blind Spot. Notice What You See In The Location Of The Dot When It's In Your Blind Spot. When The Dot Disappears, You Do Not Perceive A Hole Of Whiteness Or Blackness In Its Place; Instead Your Brain Invents A Patch Of The Background Pattern. Your Brain, With No Information From That Particular Spot In Visual Space, Fills In With The Patterns Around It. You're Not Perceiving What's Out There. You're Perceiving Whatever Your Brain Tells You.

Those With Anton's Syndrome Are Not Pretending They Are Not Blind; They Truly Believe They Are Not Blind. Their Verbal Reports, While Inaccurate, Are Not Lies. Instead, They Are Experiencing What They Take To Be Vision, But It Is All Internally Generated.