In your head, there’s this thing shaped like a cauliflower, with the texture of tofu. It generates the world you’re living in. Incredible, right? That’s why talking to Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience, is pretty amazing, as Maria Hawranek found out.
Maria Hawranek: In your book 30-Second Brain, you write that the brain is the shape of a cauliflower, has the texture of tofu, and has so many connections that it would take us about three million years to count them all. That’s beyond comprehension. Then you go on to describe how our perception is deceiving us. You mention inattentional blindness, phantom limbs, synaesthesia, and that colour basically doesn’t exist. So what does exist?