How well do you know your own mind? How well do you understand its inner workings? And can you really trust it, to tell you what it’s seeing? Our brains are made up of about a hundred trillion individual cells, none of which has any consciousness of its own. So how do these cells work together to create a conscious brain?
Dan Dennet believes, as other philosophers have said, that “consciousness is a bag of tricks.” In other words, the brain isn’t always being perfectly honest. Sometimes it will make you believe that you’ve seen something when you haven’t.
Tests (many of which Dennett demonstrates for the audience) have shown that people often have a really difficult time noticing change. The thing is, the focal region of our eyes is incredibly small—about the size of a thumbnail held up at arm’s length. That is where we get our detail from—the rest of the field of vision is remarkably lacking in detail. To make up for this deficiency, or in situations where additional detail is suggested but not shown, the brain simply fills in the blanks.
Try a couple of these tests and see what you think of your mind’s ability to trick you.
Watch this video here
