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The consultant neurologist and BBC radio presenter has a new book exploring the relationship between sensory perception and the reality it creates
Guy Leschziner is a consultant neurologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals. His areas of expertise are epilepsy and sleep disorders. He has presented two BBC radio series, one on sleep and another on the neurology of our sensory world. His latest book is The Man Who Tasted Words, which explores the relationship between our sensory perception and the reality it constructs.
A common phrase in cognitive neuroscience is “perception is nothing more than controlled hallucination”. What exactly does that mean?What we think of as a hallucination is an experience that is devoid of reality or removed from reality. And the term “controlled hallucination” implies that our experiences are constructed by the brain. As I point out in the book, sometimes what we perceive to be reality is very different from the cold, hard reality or what we assumed to be the cold, hard reality around us. So it is essentially stressing the point that what we term reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system.
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