How neuroscientists are challenging our understanding of reality.
Julian Baggini uncovers how neuroscientists are challenging our understanding of reality and piecing together how we perceive the world around us.
“Science seems to be at war with itself,” wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1940. The source of the internal battle is that science starts by studying the world as it appears to us, on the assumption that it is real. Yet what science then discovers is that reality is not as it seems at all. Solid objects under an electron microscope are revealed to be filled with empty space; time is relative; you can measure the speed or position of a particle but not both. Science seems to pull the rug of reality from under its own feet.
If Russell found this worrying in 1940, today it seems our everyday grip on reality is more slender than ever. Neuroscientists at the Francis Crick Institute are among many around the world who have turned their gaze to the inner workings of the brain and found that our perceptions of the world are even further removed from its objective reality than we thought.
Of course, we have known for a long time that colours, shapes, sounds and smells are in an important sense created by our sensory apparatus and are not just ‘out there’ waiting to be detected.
Take smell. We know that many animals have far more sensitive olfactory perception than we do. There are scents and tastes out there that we just don’t notice. What’s more, the quality of olfactory experiences varies not just between species but within them, as Andreas Schaefer, Principal Group Leader at the Crick’s Sensory Circuits and Neurotechnology Laboratory, explains, “Everyone has different genetic composition of receptors.”
This means that the smell of, for example, the pheromone androstenone varies from person to person. “A third of people smell androstenone as floral. To others, it smells like urine. And to others, it smells like nothing. And that can be traced quite well to the genetic markup.”
Credit: Francis Crick Institute