This may at first appear to be a stupid question. Of course, we are real. Ask another question like, “What is real?” The world is real. Everything around us is real. We can reach out and touch something and it is there. These are all commonsense answers to the question of reality. However, if we delve into the subject, we may find things are not quite what they seem and the senses we rely on to prove this reality may not be as accurate as we think.
To question reality as we know it or think we know it, we first must understand how we receive and process the evidence of reality. This process is called Saltatory Conduction which was identified in 1939 by the Japanese-American biophysicist Ichiji Tasaki. We have five ways of sensing things. These are visual through our eyes, hearing via our ears, smell through our nose, taste on our tongue and touch through our skin. When we interact with something, which if you think about it happens constantly, our senses send a message via our peripheral nervous system or PNS to our central nervous system or CNS and then to the brain for processing.
This may seem straightforward and it is. However, it is not as simple as this as it has been shown that saltatory conduction does not explore what the nature of reality is only how we think we sense it. The source for this discrepancy in our understanding is how the brain analyses, filters and organises this sensory information into our three-dimensional understanding of the world around us.
It can be quite easy to fool the senses and in doing so, our mind’s interpretation of events. Anyone who has seen a magician working their illusions will know that our sense of vision can easily be diverted away from what is really happening; the playing card disappears or a ball appears under the wrong cup. We accept this because we know we are being “tricked” into believing the wrong thing.
Let us take this to a more fundamental level. We are standing in front of a chair. Our eyes see it and we can touch it. But remember all the information being carried to the brain is in the form of electrochemical signals which the brain interprets and reconstructs how the chair should look and feel. The crucial word in this is “interprets;” the brain constructs what it believes the information is feeding it.
What this all means is that as we live our life in the world, everything we sense and understand to be true is all projected by the mind and we then relate to this interpretation. You might remark that this is fine because we can trust our minds to tell us what reality is. But, your reality might be different to mine. If we take the example of questioning three witnesses to a road accident, it is quite likely that we would receive three slightly or not so slightly, different versions of it. Police and lawyers may tell you that witness statements are often very different from various witnesses. I am not saying that they would do this on purpose, it is just the different ways each of their minds interprets a situation.
This whole concept opens up further discussions into reality and what is real or not. It also poses the question in the title, “Are We Real?” To answer or at least discuss this question, you will have to wait a week.
John Pullen 