Take This Brain Experiment

A quick experiment. Please read the text block below and then say out loud what it says:

.

The

illusion of

of 'seeing'

Did you say it out loud? Ok.

When Alva Noe, a professor of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley, asked someone in our group at the Templeton-Cambridge course on science and religion to read the slide out loud, our classmate read it as, "The illusion of seeing." That's the way I read it too.

But in fact what it says is "The illusion of of 'seeing'" repeating the word "of" which most of us missed.

This was a simple illustration of his larger point: what we think happens is a combination of what actually happened and our expectations and assumptions. We assume a certain coherence to a thought that would be put forth by a professor on this subject, so we all simply didn't notice the extra 'of.'

This fed into his larger argument implicitly criticizing some of the research we'd heard about in earlier sessions that attempts to understand the functioning of the mind by studying the brain. We can't do only that, Noe says. "Consciousnessness is not something that happens inside of you. It's something you do. Like all acts, it depends on context. The brain is necessary for consciousness but it's not sufficient."

Consequently, he's skeptical about studies that either attempt to prove religious experience by looking at brain scans -- or studies that attempt to prove that religious experience is merely a particular confabulation of chemicals.

You can find out more about his theories at his website, www.alvanoe.com or through his fascinating book, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

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