No Stupid Questions

... Asked the brain about itself. Typical narcissistic brain behavior, don't see the other organs doing it.

Basically, yes. Our eyes capture the light that goes into them at 24 frames per second (please correct me if I goofed on that) and the image is upside down.

Our brains turn those images upright, and it also fills in the blanks. The brain basically guesses what's going on between the frames. It's highly adapt at pattern recognition and estimation.

My favorite example of this is our nose. Look at you nose. You can look down and see it a little, and you can close one eye and see more of it. It's right there in the bottom center of our view, but you don't see it at all everyday.

That's because it's always there, and your brain filters it out. The pattern of our nose being there doesn't change, so your brain just ignores it unless you want to intentionally see it. You can extrapolate that to everything else. Most things the brain expects to see, and does see through our eyes, is kind of ignored. It's there, but it's not as important as say, anything that's moving.

Also, and this is fun to think about, we don't even see everything. The color spectrum is far wider than what our eyes can recognize. There are animals, sea life and insects that can see much much more than we can.

But to answer more directly, you are right, the brain does crazy heavy lifting for all of our senses, not just sight. Our reality is confined to what our bodies can decifer from the world through our five senses.

I find myself often wondering what colors look like to other people because there is no way to know for sure that what I see as red looks the same to everyone else. It's just a frequency of light. How the brain interprets that is anybody's guess. I can't describe the difference of red vs blue and I've never met anyone else who could either. Maybe what I see as red is actually what I see as blue to someone else.

One thing I find very interesting about how brains process reality is that there's a disease that makes your eyes have blind spots. However people with that disease don't see those blind spots because the brain fills the gaps with the information it knows to be there. So you could see a door closed just as it was when you last looked at it directly, but in the meantime someone opened the door and you're still seeing the door closed until you look at it directly.

I don't think it's the brain but rather our consciousness that is limited. Our sensory inputs are always on and processed by the brain, but our consciousness is very picky and also slow.

People can sometimes recall true memories that they weren't aware of, or react to things they didn't think of and such.

Consciousness is also somehow lagging behind the actual decision making, but always presents itself as the cause of action.

Sort of like Windows telling you that you removed a USB stick 2 seconds after you did it and was well aware of it happening. Consciousness is like that, except it takes responsibility for it too..

When it encounters something that it didn't predict, it'll tell you that "yeah this happened and this is why you did that". Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.

This is a good thing mostly, because it allows you to react faster than having to consider your options consciousnessly. You do not need to or have time to make a conscious decision to dodge a dodgeball, but you'll still think you did.

Your brain is constantly processing the inputs from all of your senses and pretty much ignoring them if they fit with what it is already expecting.

Your brain is lazy. If everything seems to fit with what your brain expects then you believe that what you are seing is reality and you generally ignore it.

Generally the mind only focuses on what it believes is salient/interesting/unexpected.

Here's an interesting related factoid - your eyes are constantly making tiny micromovements called saccades. During these movements, you don't receive any visual information. Your actual view of the world comes in stuttering fits and starts. You don't notice this because your brain literally invents what you think you're seeing during saccades. It's good enough not to get you weeded out of the gene pool.

I heard a similar thing. But a bit more complicated. It wouldn't be just the eyes, but all senses used by the brain to edit a filtered vision of reality.

And while the eyes take in everything they're capable of, the brain only focuses on what it considers important. Which is probably false due to the many, many times one will search for something within their cone of vision, yet are unable to see it.

So while I'm not sure of the details, the brain can be thought of as choosy with what it shows.

How do our brains process reality? Like this.

You can stop time by looking at a clock hand briefly. It’s your brain filling in blanks.

https://www.popsci.com/science/why-do-clock-hands-seem-to-slow-down/

https://omny.fm/shows/inner-cosmos-with-david-eagleman/ep78-does-your-brain-have-one-model-of-the-world-o

Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world? What is special about the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, and what does that have to do with the way that you explore and come to understand the world? Are there new theories of how the brain operates? And in what ways is it doing something very different than current AI? Join Eagleman with guest Jeff Hawkins, theoretician and author of "A Thousand Brains" to dive into Hawkins' theory of many models running in the brain at once.

I mean all animals have brains to render reality, aka visual, audio, predator awareness. It's not so special, most animals have tiny little brains.