Being You (2021) by Anil Seth

Book Review

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

   I'm always up for a cross-over hit about neuro-science.  Oliver Sacks and his hit The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is emblematic of the genre, and the entries in this category range from the anecdotal to complicated-science-rendered-comprehensible-for-the-lay-person.  Sacks would be on the anecdotal end of the spectrum, and Seth, and Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, is on the other.  Seth is a major contributor in the scientific field of consciousness studies, and he is serious about advancing his primary thesis: That what we experience as "reality" is in fact a controlled hallucination assembled by our brain.  In other, more colloquial terms, reality really is "an illusion," and a movie like The Matrix is more accurate than our traditional conception of reality being some concrete experience with an objective reality.

  Examples, of course, abound, but one that should be familiar to all is the phenomenon of "the dress" which could be seen as either white and gold or blue and black depending on the viewer.  The dress is a concrete example that reality is 100% subjective, because it tricks everyone's brain in the same way, and different results are obtained.   Seth's research has revealed many interesting aspects of consciousness- another key finding is that reality tends to be shaped by prior experience- in other words, we will continue to see what we expect to see, even in situations where there has been a key change.