Your Brain May be Switching Between Two Versions of Reality 15 Times a Second

hubie writes:

Your Brain May Be Switching Between Two Versions of Reality 15 Times a Second:

How grounded do you feel in the present moment? It may be a little less than you think.

Even as you fix your gaze on the screen in front of you to read these words, your brain may be flickering between what you're consciously taking in and other visual information that never quite reaches your awareness.

A new preprint study involving both macaque monkeys and humans suggests that the brain may be switching back and forth between conscious and unconscious information around 15 times a second - raising the strange possibility that something other than visual availability is guiding your conscious experience of the world.

"At any moment, only some of the brain's activity reaches conscious awareness, while the rest is processed without ever being experienced," writes a team led by neuroscientists Janis Hesse and Doris Tsao of the University of California, Berkeley.

"How this division arises is among the most basic unsolved problems in neuroscience."

There are many things our bodies just do automatically, and sensing is one of them. We move through the world under a constant barrage of sensory information, and we cannot turn off our ability to take it in.

What our brains can do is deprioritize some of that information. The famous example is your nose. It's always sitting bang in the middle of your field of view, but your brain mostly tunes it out. You know it's there; you don't need your eyes to keep confirming it.

This is obviously extremely useful. Without it, we'd be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sensory input our brains receive.

But it also raises a huge question: How does the brain determine which information we consciously experience, and which information remains hidden from awareness?

To seek answers, neuroscientists have spent decades studying which parts of the brain become active when stimuli are being consciously perceived. Over time, however, a problem emerged. The same parts of the brain can respond to unconscious stimuli, too.

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