Agnostic.com

8 10

LINK TED Talk: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Seth

I think this may at lest in part explain "religious experiences".

snytiger6 9 July 12
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

8 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

2

Also would explain trump supporters lol

redhog Level 7 July 13, 2020
1

I think you have something there, particularly in regard to people who go off on religious retreats, of one sort or another, who put themselves into situations of sensory deprivation, and "see" their god.

2

The big hill you played on as a child is later found out to be no more than a mound. Your eye is a camera that sees everything upside down and then your brain fixes that for you.

As a child, the hill appeared bigger than it does now, because you are bigger in relation to it, and you have much more experience, I would guess, with hills, and mountains.
I have a credenza that was my parent's before I was born. As a child it certainly seemed huge, and massive, back when I was knee high to a grasshopper, looking up at it.

3

I don't know about all that, but most of what we "remember" isn't factual memory. There's no such thing. Memories, from the moment we encode them, are flavored by our perceptions, our biases, our preconceptions, our emotions. And what we recall is further flavored by how we're asked to recount it.

For example, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted the 1974 Car Crash Experiment (they didn't really crash any cars, don't worry) to evaluate whether wording questions a certain way could influence a participant’s recall by twisting their memories of a specific event.

The participants watched slides of a car accident and were asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses to the scene. The participants were put into two groups and each group was questioned using different wording such as “how fast was the car driving at the time of impact?” versus “how fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?” The experimenters found that the use of different verbs affected the participants’ memories of the accident, showing that memory can be easily distorted.

Memory can be easily manipulated by the questioning technique, meaning that information gathered after the event can merge with original memory causing the addition of false details or "confabulation". It's even documented that suspects have confessed to, and worse, believed they were guilty of, crimes they never committed, in some cases Satanic ritual abuse, because repeated questioning made them doubt their own memories.

Every time we recall a "memory," we, apparently, change it a bit.

2

Some fascinating material there.
For more on consciousness, read "Descartes’ Error, Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, " by Antonio Damasio.
My belief about "religious experiences" is related, as I see them as "interior" interpretations of experiences. I once worked with a woman who said she'd become a serious believer after having an experience, that she "Knew" had to be of a connection with her god. I do not recall the details, but what she described could have been interpreted in other ways, as well. But, if one is set up, programmed by one's experiences to think that the world operates in mysterious ways, then a given experience could be seen as "Aha! There is god speaking to me!"
I made a comment, once, in public, to a friend, about a coincidence. A woman nearby, on the bus with us, easily overheard it and came out with her programming: "There are no coincidences." Her unspoken assumption was that "coincidences are god's way of speaking to you."

2

This whole stay at home has me addicted to TED.

I can see that! I'm taking the 2nd on-line course via "FutrureLearn."

1

That is why religions are such a whimsical fantasy!!!

2

That was good. Definitely worth 17 minutes of my time. Thanks. 🙂

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:514738
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.