Our consciousness - just a hallucination?

An interesting TED talk by Anil Seth about how we understand the world around us and ourselves.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." 

"Seeing the world through my eyes." 

These well-known proverbs already give a clear indication that it has been clear to us for a very long time: The world doesn't look the same for everyone.

How we perceive the world and what we experience has a lot to do with the environment in which we grow up and what experiences we had then. It's not the external stimuli that give rise to our image of the world, rather it's the other way around. The world out there is an "inside out" view - a summary of how the stimuli from outside make sense to our brain. And this sense looks a little different for everyone.

So what is reality then? Well - quite simply - if we agree to have similar ideas (or hallucinations) of the same thing - then that is "reality" for us.

Exciting, isn't it? No wonder then that lots of customer behavior seems inexplicable and sometimes irrational to us. To develop the right products and services for your customers, you need a concrete picture of what your customers' world looks like from their perspective - how it's "constructed". You can see more of this in the video by Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality.