Article Your brain flickers between two realities 15 times a second

[C C]

https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mind...-a-second/

EXCERPTS: Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University discovered that the primate brain does not hold a steady picture of reality. Instead, neurons flick back and forth between what we consciously see and what our minds suppress about 15 times every second. Led by Janis K. Hesse and Doris Y. Tsao, the research team found that the key to consciousness may depend less on where information lives in the brain and more on when neurons fire.

[...] Stare straight ahead for a moment. The tip of your nose sits squarely in the center of your vision, yet your mind erases it unless you deliberately look for it. Our eyes constantly drink in a flood of light and motion, much like a movie projector flashing 24 still frames every second to create the illusion of seamless movement. But what if half of those frames contained hidden scenes that your brain processed in secret and edited out of your awareness?

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University discovered that the primate brain does not hold a steady picture of reality. Instead, neurons flick back and forth between what we consciously see and what our minds suppress about 15 times every second. Led by Janis K. Hesse and Doris Y. Tsao, the research team found that the key to consciousness may depend less on where information lives in the brain and more on when neurons fire.

“At any moment, only some of the brain’s activity reaches conscious awareness, while the rest is processed without ever being experienced,” the researchers wrote. “How this division arises is among the most basic unsolved problems in neuroscience.”

[...] If the brain represents the hidden face so vividly 15 times a second, why don’t we see it flickering in our vision? The team discovered that during the “conscious” windows, neurons fired with about 21 percent sharper sensitivity to facial features than they did during the “suppressed” windows. That extra sharpness may act like a neural megaphone, flagging only the conscious frames for the rest of the brain to notice while keeping the suppressed frames backstage.

Previously, in a 2024 Nature study on visual memory, Tsao’s group showed that the brain uses similar time-slicing to juggle present sight and past memories in the same cells without mixing them up. Sampling the unseen world in brief background flashes may have aided our ancestors in survival. It lets us stay locked onto a task while our brains quietly monitor the environment for hidden dangers or alternative interpretations.

Still, the researchers note that their work — which awaits peer review — examined specific visual and frontal patches in just two monkeys. A major mystery remains: what acts as the conductor for this 15-hertz rhythm? (MORE - missing details)

PREPRINT PAPER: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898...1.full.pdf

[Magical Realist]

Wow..this is remarkably resonant with my recent studies into Whitehead's theory of symbolic reference and its synthetic unification of our two underlying modes of perception: causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. That the brain fuses these two rapidly alternating frames of perception into one persistent and invariant window of awareness correlates well with this idea.

"Alfred North Whitehead introduces symbolic reference in his 1927 book Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, defining it as the synthetic activity that fuses two distinct modes of perception into a single, coherent experience.

The Two Modes of Perception

• Causal Efficacy: The vague, visceral, bodily feeling of the past acting upon the present—the primal sense of vector force, emotion, or causal impact from the world (e.g., feeling a push or a looming threat).

• Presentational Immediacy: The clear, crisp, spatialized sensory data presented like a picture on a screen (e.g., seeing colors, shapes, patterns, or empty space).

How Symbolic Reference Works

• Synthesis: The mind bridges these two modes, interpreting the vague affective weight of causal efficacy through the sharp geometry of presentational immediacy.

• Mutual Charging: Sensory data from presentational immediacy become "charged" with meaning and emotional resonance from causal efficacy.

• Role in Error: Whitehead famously noted that error does not happen within the modes themselves (which function accurately on their own terms), but in the misconnection of symbolic reference—such as seeing an open, clear glass door via presentational immediacy while your body expects a clear path through causal efficacy, leading you to walk straight into the glass."

It would've been helpful if Whitehead had employed the general concept of the unconscious mind or implicit cognition into his theory, which accounts for the high-speed autonomous processing and collation of perceptual contents that we are simply incapable of performing consciously.

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