Be Brilliant Every Day

The Umwelt

‘I went on a positive thinking course. It was shit.’

Gary Delaney

Strap yourself in, there's some conceptual stuff coming up. I don't want to get too metaphysical, but, as humans, we are only detecting a tiny slice of the world around us. What we are able to experience is limited by our biology. Take human vision, for example. We have special receptors at the back of our eyes that ping into action when they catch some radiation, and that causes an avalanche of signals to the brain, which creates vision. So, hey presto, your brain filters these signals and you can see.

But you can only see a small part of the world around you (the light spectrum that is visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it according to David Eagleman). ...