What Psychedelics Reveal About How We See the World

The camera is a common metaphor for human vision. In the eyeball, the comparison holds up: both cameras and eyes have an aperture, a lens, and a sheet of detectors that turn light into an image. But once you consider the rest of the brain, the metaphor completely falls apart.

In this talk, Michael Silver, Professor of Optometry and Vision Science and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley, shows how our conscious visual experience of the world is actively constructed by the brain and shaped by what we're attending to, our expectations, our goals, and a lifetime of past experience. What we see is informed by the light entering our eyes, but our actual experience is closer to a controlled hallucination, an inference the brain generates to make sense of incoming neural activity.

Silver, who directs the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, will describe how research with psilocybin is helping scientists better understand these inferences, and consciousness itself.