Page 22 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

e acknowledge that all the individual features of the world
are experienced through our sense organs. The information
that reaches us through those organs is converted into
W electrical signals, and the individual parts of our brain
analyze and process these signals. After this interpreting process takes place
inside our brain, we will, for example, see a book, taste a strawberry, smell a
flower, feel the texture of a silk fabric or hear leaves shaking in the wind.

We have been taught that we are touching the cloth outside of our body,
reading a book that is 30 cm (1 ft) away from us, smelling the trees that are far
away from us, or hearing the shaking of the leaves that are far above us.
However, this is all in our imagination. All of these things are happening
within our brains.
At this point we encounter another surprising fact; that there are, in fact,
no colors, voices or visions within our brain. All that can be found in our brains
are electrical signals. This is not a philosophical speculation. This is simply a
scientific description of the functions of our perceptions. In her book Mapping

The Mind, Rita Carter explains the way we perceive the world as follows:
Each one [of the sense organs] is intricately adapted to deal with its own
type of stimulus: molecules, waves or vibrations. But the answer does not
lie here, because despite their wonderful variety, each organ does
essentially the same job: it translates its particular type of stimulus into
electrical pulses. A pulse is a pulse is a pulse. It is not the colour red, or
the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth—it is a bit of electrical energy.
Indeed, rather than discriminating one type of sensory input from
another, the sense organs actually make them more alike.

All sensory stimuli, then enter the brain in more or less
undifferentiated form as a stream of electrical pulses created by neurons
firing, domino-fashion, along a certain route. This is all that happens.
There is no reverse transformer that at some stage turns this electrical
activity back into light waves or molecules. What makes one stream into
vision and another into smell depends, rather, on which neurons are
stimulated. 1
In other words, all of our feelings and perceptions about the world
(smells, visions, tastes etc.) are comprised of the same material, that is,
electrical signals. Moreover, our brain is what makes these signals meaningful

20 MATTER: THE OTHER NAME FOR ILLUSION