The Rodney of Kuhn pointed me to an interesting series of audio clips that demonstrate how the brain makes use of sense data to construct or reconstruct your reality (or sense of it). Go here and listen to the Virtual Haircut clip with stereo headphones with your eyes closed. I won’t spoil anything and altering your personal experience, so just have an open mind and see what happens. Parts of it are a bit creepy.

So what you listen to above is an example of your mind taking external data and reconstructing it, or ‘realizing’ it (i.e. making it real). Dreams follow a somewhat reverse process where the data has been constructed (or should we say reconstructed) in your subconscious, and then ‘realized’ in your consciousness. Dreams are incredibly real when you are having them because your mind cannot distinguish between internal and external reality. Once you wake up, that smudgy barrier between internal and external reality fades and you begin to realise what you thought was real was actually not. Or wasn’t it?

Popular personal improvement and psychology books speak about the need for internal visualization in order to realize goals. I hope the brief discussion above shows the truth in this and how inner reality can become transformed in to outer reality. Hopefully some serious scientists will start mainstreaming this area of psychology.

posted by rowanp at 1:21 pm & filed under technology, philosophy |