Reality is an affective and controlled hallucination

A crispy, sweet apple. Did you feel anything when you read these words? Now imagine that when you bite into an apple it is actually salty. You would, at least, be surprised.

Why does it happen? Some neuroscientists claim it’s because your brain is predictive rather than reactive.

When we bite into an apple, we taste not just the apple, but all the apples we’ve ever eaten. What does it mean?

If we act in the world in a predictive way, what allows us to predict our actions?

On the one hand, the context, the information we receive from the world from the senses. On the other hand, our past experiences.

We experience reality as a combination of these two things: information from the external world and from past experience.

And some neuroscientists claim that we use the internal construction of reality more than the data of the world at that particular moment.

Therefore, they claim that reality is a controlled hallucination (watch this TED Talk for more).

Well, hold on to this information: we experience a controlled hallucination built on our previous experiences.

Now, think about this, our memories are all affective. Our brain does not separate what is rational and what is emotional. When we learn and build our concepts, they are not in the brain separated from feelings in a different compartment (see this TED Talk for more on the meaning of affect).

This means that we experience reality, which is largely our past, affectively all the time.

When we handle or read a book, it is not just an object as defined in the dictionary. It is a construction that took place throughout our lives of what a book is, including contexts and feelings. A construction resulted from the identification of patterns — including how our body acted when in contact with a book.

In short, I’m talking about 2 complementary concepts: we have a predictive brain that uses the past to “see” reality + the way we build these memories and concepts is always affective.

Thus, there is no way to separate reason and emotion. It is not even possible to imagine that learning can take place outside the affective context, because this simply does not exist in human beings. Our nature is affective.