As you scroll through this article, your brain is hard at work creating the mental world you live in. You probably have a seamless sense that you’re embedded in a world full of other people, objects, and your own thoughts.
By the time you’ve read this sentence, your brain will have rapidly decoded data in its sensorium (the part that receives and interprets sensory information) – turning the shapes on this screen into a voice in your head. But that’s not all. It’s also making deeper, faster judgments.
For instance, though we’ve never met, your brain probably made some snap assumptions about me, especially after I used a word like sensorium. (Academic? Yes. Pompous? I’ll let you decide.)
Or perhaps it triggered a more inward-looking response: confidence or uncertainty about what sensorium really means.
As a psychologist and neuroscientist, my job is to understand how the brain pulls off this remarkable trick – how it builds the illusion of an external world.
