full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Anil Seth: How your brain invents your "self"

Unscramble the Blue Letters

How things are is very different, and the story of how and why this is so is what I want to give you a flavor of today. In this story, the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. The self is a perception too, or rather, it's the cltiocelon of related perceptions. Experiences of the self and of the wolrd turn out to be kinds of controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses that remain tied to the world and the body in ways determined not by their accuracy, but by their utiilty, by their usefulness for the organism in the binuesss of snyitag alive.

Open Cloze

How things are is very different, and the story of how and why this is so is what I want to give you a flavor of today. In this story, the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. The self is a perception too, or rather, it's the __________ of related perceptions. Experiences of the self and of the _____ turn out to be kinds of controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses that remain tied to the world and the body in ways determined not by their accuracy, but by their _______, by their usefulness for the organism in the ________ of _______ alive.

Solution

  1. business
  2. staying
  3. utility
  4. collection
  5. world

Original Text

How things are is very different, and the story of how and why this is so is what I want to give you a flavor of today. In this story, the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. The self is a perception too, or rather, it's the collection of related perceptions. Experiences of the self and of the world turn out to be kinds of controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses that remain tied to the world and the body in ways determined not by their accuracy, but by their utility, by their usefulness for the organism in the business of staying alive.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
coffee cup 3
sensory signals 3
perceptual experience 3
transparent windows 2
real world 2
red coffee 2
color red 2
prediction error 2
continuous stream 2

Important Words

  1. accuracy
  2. alive
  3. body
  4. business
  5. collection
  6. controlled
  7. determined
  8. experiences
  9. flavor
  10. give
  11. guesses
  12. hallucinations
  13. kinds
  14. organism
  15. perceiving
  16. perception
  17. perceptions
  18. related
  19. remain
  20. staying
  21. story
  22. tied
  23. today
  24. turn
  25. usefulness
  26. utility
  27. ways
  28. world