Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), This week let me bring to your attention an interesting excerpt from this thought provoking & an important work, by Dr. Robert Ornstein & Sally Ornstein. Robert Ornstein was a noted psychologist and a leading expert on the brain. Founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, Ornstein wrote more than 20 books on the brain, mind, and consciousness emphasizing our urgent need and ability to develop perceptions beyond our biological inheritance. Sally M. Ornstein is the editor of “Ideas That Shaped Our Modern World,” a comprehensive overview of the role of religion throughout human history.

The Neurophysiology of Everyday – Is Our Reality Really Real

Everyone has essentially the same basic brain structure. The reason we all experience the world in the specific ways that we do is because our bodies, genes and nervous systems are built the way they are, and because of the way we evolved.

Based on what we now know about the mind’s workings, we can safely say that our everyday experience in not, in fact, “reality”. Rather, our ordinary awareness is a “virtual reality” – a personal construction, something computed within our minds, not a full or accurate registration of what is outside.

In fact, human sensory systems serve mainly for data reduction. From the limited, tiny fraction of information and energy that passes through our senses, we are continuously making up a virtual reality inside our brain.

While our eyes can transmit to the brain a vast display of colors, shapes and movements, it’s nothing compared with what is going on outside of us. Only a miniscule amount – as little as one-trillionth – of the outside ambient energy that strikes the eyes gets passed through the brain.

The cells in the retina and in the occipital cortex translate this small sample as the experience of light, and they code its different wavelengths as colors. Sensing maybe carried out with the help of our senses, but it actually takes place in the brain.

One interesting way to observe this in action is with a “Benham’s disk” – a small circular diagram or spinning top that contains swaths of black and white. When you spin it, you see colors – usually red and green. There is no color in the disk itself, so what happened? The black and white segments, at certain speeds, produce the same neural code that the eye sends to the brain for information about color. We don’t – cant – see color or the world directly. In the same manner, only a tiny fragment of the vibrations in the air that reach the ear are selected, coded and sent to the brain to finally become the experience of sound. The brain makes it all up and calls it “reality”.

Since our reality evolved to ensure our survival, it of course has to have some correspondence with the external world, even on a miniscule basis.

Each organism has evolved a sensory system and a nervous system to select what it needs to get through the day in its neighborhood.

The “reality” each organism lives inside – whether it is our own or that of ants, cows and, for all we know, grass – is a virtual one. They are virtual adaptations of external reality that evolved for the survival needs of each organism.

There is no real reason to consider the neuropsychological complexities and limitations when we’re all involved in the comings and goings of everyday life. That’s the point of the automatic filtering and highlighting: it keeps us unaware of all the work going on behind the scenes. If we did not filter out all the extraneous information, we would be unable to attend to critical input that might determine our safety and survival.