I'm Elise Hu, you're listening to TED Talks Daily.

And today, a talk about how we see the world and what's happening in our brains when we see it.

From a TED membership event, the cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth considers the reality we experience in our brains versus the real world and how it actually is.

It's followed by a Q&A session with Ted's science curator David Bielo about perceptual experience

and how it collides with our very sense of self and each other. It's very cool.

To learn more and become a TED member, check out ted.com slash membership.

I mean, who am I? Who is anyone really? When I wake up in the morning and open my eyes,

a world appears. And these days, since I've hardly been anywhere, it's a very familiar world.

There's the wardrobe beyond the end of the

bed, the shuttered windows, the shrieking of seagulls, which drives Brighton residents like me

absolutely crazy. But even more familiar is the experience of being a self, of being me,

that glides into existence at almost the same time. Now, this experience of

selfhood is so mundane that its appearance is usually just happens without us noticing at all.

We take ourselves for granted, but we shouldn't. How things seem is not how they are.

For most of us, most of the time, it seems as though the self, your self, is an enduring

and unified entity, an essence, a unique identity.

Perhaps it seems as though the self is the recipient of wave upon wave of perceptions,

as if the world just pours itself into the minds through the transparent windows of the senses.

Perhaps it seems as though the self is the decision-maker-in-chief,

deciding what to do next and then doing it, or as the case may be, doing something else. We sense,

we think, and we act. This is how things seem. How things are is very different. And the story of

how and why this is so is what I want to give you a flavour of today. In this story, the self is not the thing that

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