You might be surprised to hear that we are the prisoners of our own brains. The brain is under our control. How could we become the prisoners of our own brains? However, scientists have found that it is true. A group in Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute in San Francisco discovered that we only see what our brains allow us to see. People often look without seeing even when the object is within the field of vision.As reported in issue 414 of Nature the subjects in this study were shown some spinning blue spots with a background of stationary yellow spots.

However, all yellow spots disappeared from the vision of the subjects. Those yellow spots were made invisible not by the computer, but by the brains of the subjects themselves. The yellow spots were still on the screen, but people simply did not see them. The article suggests that our brains hold notions about how the world should be. Based on these notions, the brain will determine what we should and should not see. In this experiment, subjects were shown both the spinning blue spots and the stationary yellow spots, but their brains only allowed them to see the blue spots. This phenomenon is called motion induced blindness.


Researchers believe that this happens in our daily life, but we simply do not realize it. For example, when driving on a highway with many car lights, a driver often ignores the tail light of the car in a side lane.We all believe that what we sense through our sensory organs is real. We accept what the brain processes from our sense organs as true. From this study, we know that this notion is not true. It is our brain that determines what we can and cannot see. Then who determines what our brains see? Who tells our brains in advance how this world should be?

In fact what our eyes can see is limited. Our eyes can only sense visible light with wavelengths from 312 nm to 1,050 nm. On both the macroscopic and microscopic levels, all we can see is only a tiny part of the universe, and objects that enter our vision can only be seen after screened by our brains. Our cognitive ability is restricted by the limitations of our sensory organs. A paper published on May 17, 2002, in Science magazine reported that a six-month-old infant has a greater ability to distinguish between the faces of a man and an animal than a nine-month-old infant does. What is more, a six-month infant can distinguish differences between languages, while a nine-month-old infant can only distinguish differences within his/her language.

We all believe that our abilities are acquired during the education process after birth, but actually some truly amazing abilities are gradually lost after birth.

We know there are many records in both Oriental and western culture about peoples supernormal abilities. Today these reports are considered myths. However, we can observe the regression of human abilities, such as the regression of the abilities of a six-month-old infant to those of a nine-month-old infant. Because we have a pair of flesh eyes and a brain governed by notions of how this world should be, we cannot see the true picture of our own world.

An interesting fact indeed.

Here is also a very good example of your brain misinterpreting reality:

Stare at the black cross in the middle and hold your head steady, very quickly the pink dots will dissapear and you will see a green dot rotating clockwise while there is no green dot at all!


Link to a motion induced blindness as described above:
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/

This article is higly misleading. We are not 'prisoners of our own brains'. We are not blind to objects, language, etc simply because we dont 'preceive' something. Even though it may be in our field of vision, it is our EXPERIENCE, and not our brains, that filter out unecessary information. Our brains receives all receptive data, our perception filters out uncessary data

For instance the the highway example...we have all driven long enough to know it is much more important to pay attnetion to the cars in front of you ...and only to notice a sharp change next to you. This keeps you focused on the necessary. When you first learned to drive you were paranoid about eery single car...then you learned what you need pay attention to and what can be placed in the background of your focus.


Or another classical cognitive perception example is that when you see an apple in a grocery store that looks good...your experience has told you a grocery store is a HIGHLY reliable source for whole apples. Technically you can only see the front of the apple....every apple in the store could be cut in half so that you only see the front half and assume the rest is there. Of course your experience has told you to expect whole apples. As a child you didnt have this concept in your head.....you held and explored objects and eventually realized the concept of whole objects and what to expect.

All this is done for survival. Imagine if you never learned these concepts you developed..had to pay attention to every spec of data entering your brain....you wouldnt survive efficiently and would be in a cosntant state of re-learning and not being able to adapt. For instance imagine seeing several people die form a poisonous fruit....but you dont learn and just HAVE to try it for yourself. Or never learning to decipher driving concepts...youd be in constant state of paranoia and certainly crash.

Althouhg it is true we only see between certain wavelengths of the energy spectrum, this is because we have evolved to recognize the physical world through color. While we see trhough the light waves,some animals perceive the physical world through Magnetic waves, some through infared waves, etc. Our evolution has lead us to be very efficient at deciphering light wave energy as representation of physical objects in our world.

And our intellect, expereinces, and evolution has lead us to the point that we can perceive all other energy wavelegnths....even if it is indirect. We have made intruments to detect gamma rays, infrared, magnetic, x-ray, microwaves, etc. What other animal can say that?

i agree with this guy, but i agree with both of you as well, because when it comes down to it, everything is filtered by perception. i bet a sea tortoise could say that, man some of those guys live to be like half a millenia

The fact is that every thing we experience in life is not direct experience, the room you are in the stars you look at the body you experience are all just a mental image formed in your brains. It works like this information comes in through your sense organs eyes ears and so on then that information is formed into a mental image of what is around you, and it is this mental image we experience not the reality we tend to believe we are experiencing.
So it doesn’t surprise me that what we are experiencing might be flitted by are brains in some ways it can not be any other way.

I was just thinking about this a while ago, and this came to mind...

"In fact, everything we encounter in this world with our six senses is an inkblot test.
You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at."

-Shiqin

Hear is a good video on the perception of reality.
http://video.google.com/...cid=-4232897377629019446

This article interests me not because of the "slave to your brain" aspect but it just makes me think of what you're really seeing on psychedelics. When you're pupil gets bigger it lets in more light and this happens on most hallucinogens so maybe you're seeing what's always there but you don't notice or what your eyes don't normally pick up? Just a thought, and again I'm not very experienced with drugs in general I've only ever tried cannabis and salvia, but when high on weed my eyes start to notice even more contrast between shadow and light, even in my peripheral vision unlike when I'm straight.

Now that you understand that concept, imagine what your eyes and brain as a whole cannot see. There could be an entire demension sitting right in front of us. Another world living and breathing right in front of our faces at this very second.

I love thinking about that.

If you ever played some balgame, you probably know that after some practice, at a certain moment you just know where the ball is without having to see it all the time. Whatever your senses feed you with, at some moment your brain will anticipate on those aspects it considers relevant. Every picture of 'reality' as such, always reveals only one part of it but it is in our anticipation on these parts, we lean on in our day to day survival. our ability to survive is proofs our ability to anticipate and our ability to anticipate shows our ability to know.
Maybe you can turn the whole thing around; we don't see half of what we think we see and what we 'see' is just an extrapolation of the litle things we know (or think we know).

That was totally cool. It reminds me of how when hallucinating, something that appears spinning or waving from even a very short distance, as i focus in on it....it no longer is moving at the exact spot i am looking.

When our vision fails us, we rely on touch and sound.

Psychedelics tend to enhance music and sound, but not by volume - by quality, so can't we assume our vision is being enhanced too by quality?

Is there a device perhaps that we could move through our fractal hallucinations to see if the reading changes towards where there are denses clouds or different colors or shapes??

Has anyone done physical experiments on dmt hallucinations to test if any of our machines detect them at all? Or perhaps to flip it, woudl we see different patterns and/or colors in areas of a room where a machine is giving us a higher radioactivity, or an area of a room where there are more sound waves or more light passing through in the invisible spectrums?


For me, everything turns redish pink... my white bulb faced on appears to be emitting blue light on one side (left), red on the other (right), it seems to me that i can seeing a greater spectrum. Anybody else feel there is a distinct spectrum enancement?