Perception and Belief; How Real is Reality

“The two greatest mysteries in all of nature is the mind and the universe.”

Michio Kaku
The Future of the Mind

One current analogy of the brain is that of a huge corporation. There is a huge bureaucracy and lines of authority, a vast flow of information is channeled between different departments. The important information eventually finds its way to the Command Center and the CEO. There final decisions are made.

The CEO can be compared to the Frontal Cortex. The CEO is blissfully unaware of the massive amount of information constantly flowing through the brain/bureaucracy and only a small amount reaches the Command Center. Otherwise, there would be paralysis and overload.

Remember, early in our evolution our primary purpose was survival. Encountering a tiger in the forest does not require knowing the status of our stomach, toes and hair, it only requires knowing how to run!

Emotions are rapid decisions made independently at a lower level.
So fear, anger, and other negative emotions warn the command center of a dangerous or threatening environment. We have little control over our emotions They are not feelings, but a set of survival mechanisms evolved to turn us from danger and propel us to safety.

There is constant competition for the attention of the CEO.
A constant feedback loop of thoughts creates a cacophony of information and stimuli in the frontal lobe. The Concept of “I” as a single unified whole making decision continuously is an allusion created by our subconscious mind. Consciously we feel our mind is a single entity, smoothly processing information, totally in charge of our decisions. Brain scams show a quite different picture from the perception we hold in our mind. Consciousness turns out to be a storm of events distributed across the brain that compete for attention and forming competing processes. Our brain rationalized the process after the decision is made to create the impression that a single self was in charge all the time.

Final decisions are made by the CEO in the command center.
The entire bureaucracy accumulates and assembles information for the CEO. The CEO then attempts to mediate all conflicting information coming in. After all, “the buck stop here”, right? The CEO (PREFONTAL CORTEX) has to make a decision based on information from all of our senses.

Information is Hierarchical.
The brain cannot waste energy. It consumes about 20 watts of power, the maximum before the body becomes dysfunctional. It wll cause heat generation and tissue damage to consume more.

Therefore, the brain used shortcuts to conserve energy. Everyone knows the expression “seeing is believing”, yet much of what we see is an illusion. Example, a typical landscape seems like a smooth wide panorama but in reality, there is a big hole in the center where our optic nerve lies in the retina. This means the subconscious mind “paper over the hole” by averaging it out.

We have sensors in our retina that only detect red, green and blue. We have never actually seen yellow, brown, orange or any of all the other colors. The colors exist but just like infrared, UV, x-rays and gamma rays we don’t see them. Our brain mixes red, green and blue to approximate them. Color TV is an illusion.

The subconscious mind is where our perception and beliefs derived from those perceptions create the actions and decisions that create our reality.

“The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.”

Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters in order to accomplish a goal. Human consciousness creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal.

Michio Kaku