The Blank Slate Rises Again.

Enlightenment thinker John Locke (1632–1704) held that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, ready to be written over by sensory experience. Over the centuries, this idea of information flowing ‘outside in’ has lost much of its appeal, with experiments making it clear that perception involves dozens of mechanisms, actively shaping stimuli rather than passively receiving them.

In Deviate, neuroscientist Beau Lotto presents a complete reversal of the Lockean stance. To him, it is the human mind that imposes meaning on our perceptions: the true blank slate is the outside world. Even more provocative is his argument that we operate with versions of reality that have literally nothing to do with what is ‘out there’ in a physical sense. In an entertaining series of analyses, demonstrations and reflections, he drives home the point that perception, broadly taken, is not what our eyes and ears tell us; it is what our brain makes us see and hear…
@Perception: Our useful inability to see reality : Nature : Nature Research: