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Adventure I · 4 episodes

The Great Illusionist

What your brain hides from you

What if everything you perceive were a hallucination… a perfectly tuned one?

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  • about 50 min
  • Not started yet
  • Perception · Neuroscience · Psychology · Philosophy
Black-and-white lithograph: a huge eye, inflated like a hot-air balloon, rises into a gray sky above a marsh, carrying a head on a platter beneath it.
Odilon Redon · Public domain

In this adventure…

  • You will discover the hole you have in each eye.
  • You will remember a word you never read.
  • You will defend an opinion that isn’t yours.
  • You will feel a second nose at your fingertips.

What’s inside: 4 episodes with experiments, 4 episodes with bets.

The episodes

  1. The Hole in Your EyeClose your left eye: a dot is about to disappear.You don’t see the world. You see what your brain guesses about it. 13 min
    • Experiments
    • Bets
  2. Memory, the StorytellerRead fifteen words. You will remember a sixteenth.Your memory doesn’t record: it rebuilds. And it makes things up without telling you. 14 min
    • Experiments
    • Bets
  3. Who Decides?A bat and a ball cost $1.10. Answer quickly.You think you know the reasons for your choices. Your brain makes them up after the fact. 13 min
    • Experiments
    • Bets
  4. The Ghost in the MirrorCross two fingers and touch your nose.Your face, your body, your “self”: models your brain builds. 11 min
    • Experiments
    • Bets

You will meet

  • EMEdme Mariottec. 1620 – c. 1684
  • Painted portrait of an elderly man with a white beard, seated, in a dark frock coat.Hermann von Helmholtz1821 – 1894
  • SCSimonides of Ceosc. 556 – c. 468 BC
  • Photograph: Daniel Kahneman, with white hair and glasses, seated on a stage in a dark jacket.Daniel Kahneman1934 – 2024
  • Marble bust of a bearded man with a solemn gaze.Aristotle384 – 322 BC
  • Photograph: Oliver Sacks, with a gray beard and a white coat, smiles as he holds a reflex hammer and a tuning fork.Oliver Sacks1933 – 2015

The whole journeyNext adventure: The Emotion Factory