Anil Seth quotes

Dr. Anil Seth is a renowned neuroscientist and author known for his groundbreaking research on consciousness and the brain. As a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, he explores how our perception of reality is constructed by the brain. With over 100 publications and numerous awards, Dr. Seth is a leading expert in his field. His popular TED talks and best-selling book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," have captivated audiences worldwide. Stay updated on the latest insights from Dr. Seth by following him on social media and visiting his website.

The brain tries to figure out the true colour of a surface independent of the lighting conditions; so seeing colour isn’t just detecting wavelengths of light.

- Anil Seth

One recent lab-based training paradigm that has shown some promise, however, involves the tricky task of keeping in mind two different streams of information simultaneously. Not only did performance increase dramatically over the weeks of training on this fiendish exercise, but so did IQ, particularly for those who started in the lower IQ range.

- Anil Seth

Meditation even reduces the need for sleep. Due to its stress-reducing properties, meditation is increasingly being used as a clinical tool, relieving symptoms of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and other conditions.

- Anil Seth

Long-term meditators also appear somewhat protected from dementia, which makes sense given that meditation causes brain regions linked to complex thought and memory to grow instead of shrink.

- Anil Seth

Locating a cup of coffee involves linking visual information with information about the current posture of the body, which involves highly specialized mechanisms in the brain.

- Anil Seth

Imagination is a powerful, particularly human, skill. But instead of having specialized neural hardware, it is entirely reliant on our existing sensory regions.

- Anil Seth

Feelings provide the basis for human reason – brain-damaged patients left devoid of emotion struggle to make the most elementary decisions.

- Anil Seth

Breathe. Shrink that amygdala, enhance that prefrontal cortex. There is no downside to meditation. Om.

- Anil Seth

Although certain brain regions decline faster than others, we lose on average approximately 10 per cent of our grey and white matter every decade of our adult lives. Mirroring this, our powers of reasoning, as measured by non-verbal IQ tests, peaks in our early 20s and declines steadily after this.

- Anil Seth

When we suffer, we suffer consciously, whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? Might they be conscious, too? Do they also have a sense of self? And as computers get faster and smarter, maybe there will come a point, maybe not too far away, when my iPhone develops a sense of its own existence. Now I actually think the prospects for a conscious AI are pretty remote.

- Anil Seth

When the end of consciousness comes, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.

- Anil Seth

We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.

- Anil Seth

We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in, in a process hardly different from that which we casually call hallucination. Indeed, in a way, we're always hallucinating. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

- Anil Seth

We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.

- Anil Seth

Upset and resentment are a reflection of our own thoughts and can, therefore, never be caused by anyone or anything outside of ourselves.

- Anil Seth

There's this cultural trope that intelligence and consciousness go together and that AI will develop awareness at some point.

- Anil Seth

The truth is that all perceptions are acts of interpretation. They're acts of informed guesswork that the brain applies when it encounters sensory data.

- Anil Seth

The shape of our minds or the minds of any living creature can only be understood in light of their being alive.

- Anil Seth

It's because we naturally experience the contents of our perception as being real that it becomes harder to appreciate that somebody else might not experience things exactly the same way.

- Anil Seth

In our daily life we are constantly filling in the blanks to try and make sense of things.

- Anil Seth

Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.

- Anil Seth

If you think of perception as prediction then it becomes natural to think that the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. The self is a perception.

- Anil Seth

I do see this close alignment between the insights we’re getting from cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism to the extent that things are not necessarily the way they seem. Things can change. There is an impermanence to our experience, to the world, there is an impermanence to the self, and recognizing that impermanence... does open the space for change.

- Anil Seth

Human consciousness is just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.

- Anil Seth

Everything that we perceive - consciously or unconsciously - is a construction of the brain.

- Anil Seth

Consciousness is any kind of experience at all, whether it's a visual experience of the world around us, whether it's an emotional experience of feeling sad or jealousy or happy or excited. From experiences of intending to do something or being the cause of something that happens, consciousness is the word that we use to circumscribe all the different kinds of experiences that we can have.

- Anil Seth

Anesthesia is a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects and back again into people.

- Anil Seth

A good way to study a phenomenon is to see what happens when it disappears.

- Anil Seth

We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature.

- Anil Seth