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Towards understanding subjective perception
For the longest time, humanity has operated under a simple, intuitive assumption: our senses are like video cameras, faithfully recording the objective reality of the outside world, and our brains are the hard drives storing this raw, unedited footage.
We might believe that when we look at a red apple, we are seeing the exact, objective redness that exists in the physical world. We usually assume that our memories are literal playbacks of past events, and that our feelings of pain or touch are direct, untampered messages from our nerve endings.
However, modern neuroscience reveals a reality that is far more fascinating and deeply counterintuitive. Human perception is not a passive reception of external facts; it is an active, highly subjective construction. The brain does not simply record the world; it interprets, filters, and occasionally fabricates it. Everything we see, feel, remember, and experience is filtered through the unique neurobiology of our individual minds and their corresponding neural mechanisms in the brain.
By examining the mechanisms of vision, somatic (bodily) sensation, memory, and emotion, we can begin to understand just how subjective our daily reality truly is. This is not merely a biological curiosity; it is a profound philosophical revelation about what it means to be human.
If our brains are the architects of our reality, then understanding the blueprints of that architecture might be the first step toward understanding ourselves. And perhaps toward understanding one another. For if each brain builds its own reality, then no one ever has direct access to anyone else’s—every reading of what another person feels or means is itself a construction, made from the outside.
Part 1: The Visual Illusion and the Editing Room of the Mind
When considering the five senses we possess, vision often stands out as the most seemingly objective. We tend to place unwavering trust in what our eyes convey, leading us to embrace the adage, “Seeing is believing.”
However, beneath this certainty lies a fascinating paradox: our visual system is arguably the most masterful illusionist of all. The light that streams into our eyes is, at its core, just electromagnetic radiation—devoid of color or meaning in its raw form. It is the brain’s remarkable task to interpret this incoming radiation (in the visual cortex at the back of our heads), and it does so not by relying on fixed measurements but rather by assessing and comparing relative differences.
This intricate process transforms mere light into the vivid tapestry of images we perceive, reminding us that the reality we see is, in fact, a carefully constructed illusion.
The Relativity of Light and Color
Our brain does not care exactly how much light is hitting the eye; it only cares how that light compares to the light around it. This mechanism of relative comparison is what allows us to see effectively in both the glaring midday sun and the dim light of dusk. However, this same mechanism makes our visual perception highly subjective and easily influenced by the surrounding environments.
Thus, even at the earliest stages of visual processing, neural signals do not represent the absolute numbers of photons that are captured by receptors, but rather the relative intensity of stimulation—how much the current level of stimulation differs from ambient levels.
(Purves et al., 2004, p. 257)
Our brain is constantly at work, making assumptions about the world around us based on the context provided by nearby objects. This means that our perception of reality is in a state of continuous flux, shaped by the elements that surround what we see.
For instance, consider two identical gray squares: when one square is set against a deep black backdrop, it appears darker and more pronounced, while the other, set against a bright white background, appears lighter and less distinct. This phenomenon illustrates how the visual context can dramatically alter our interpretation of even the most identical forms.
For example, a patch returning the exact same spectrum of wavelengths to the eye can appear quite different depending on its surroundings, a phenomenon called color contrast.
Purves et al., 2004, p. 247
Therefore, the color we see is never merely an objective property of the object itself; it is a subjective interpretation generated by the brain’s visual circuitry, heavily influenced by context.
Case Studies in Visual Construction: Patient Dee and Patient LM
To truly grasp how constructed our vision is, we must look at what happens when the brain’s editing software is damaged. The visual system is not a single pathway from the eye to the brain; it is divided into separate pathways that process different elements of our reality simultaneously.
Consider the fascinating case of Patient Dee, described by neuroscientists David Milner and Mel Goodale (Passingham, 2016, p. 47). Dee suffered brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a leaking water heater while on holiday. This tragic accident damaged a specific region of her brain known as the lateral occipital complex, an area critical for recognizing the shape and identity of objects. The underlying dissociation between a ventral “perception” pathway and a dorsal “action” pathway was set out in the foundational account of the two visual systems, which proposed that object identification and the visual control of action depend on anatomically separable streams (Goodale & Milner, 1992).
When researchers placed a pencil on a table in front of Dee and asked her to identify its orientation, she was completely unable to do so. Her conscious perception of the object’s shape was gone. Yet, when asked to pick up the pencil, she reached out and grasped it perfectly, instinctively orienting her hand to match the angle of the pencil.
How is this possible? The brain possesses two parallel visual pathways: the “ventral” stream, which consciously recognizes objects, and the “dorsal” stream, which unconsciously guides our actions toward them. In Dee’s brain, the recognition system was destroyed, but the action-guiding system was intact. This case illustrates that our conscious visual reality is just one isolated stream of data, highly specialized and completely distinct from our physical interaction with the world.
Similarly striking is the case of Patient LM, described by neurologist Joseph Zihl (Passingham, 2016, p. 99). Patient LM suffered a lesion in the middle temporal complex of her brain, an area responsible for processing visual motion. As a result, she lost the ability to perceive motion entirely. The original case, the first well-documented report of cerebral motion blindness (akinetopsia), traced this selective deficit to a bilateral lesion at the V5/MT region (Zihl & Heywood, 2015).
When looking at a moving car, she did not see it glide down the street; instead, she saw a series of static, disjointed images, “as if a film had been slowed down until it was a succession of stills” (Passingham, 2016, p. 100). She could recognize the car perfectly by its shape, but the subjective experience of fluid motion had been erased from her reality.
The Philosophical Implication: Blindsight
Perhaps the most philosophically challenging visual phenomenon is “blindsight,” discovered by Larry Weiskrantz (Passingham, 2016, p. 176). Weiskrantz studied patients who had suffered damage to their primary visual cortex, rendering them entirely blind in one half of their visual field. They possessed absolutely no conscious awareness of anything presented in that blind area.
However, when instructed to guess the orientation of a line or the direction it was moving in their “blind” spot, these patients guessed correctly with astonishing accuracy. Visual information was still entering their brains through secondary neural routes that bypassed the conscious visual cortex. They were accurately perceiving and processing reality without any subjective awareness of doing so.
This suggests a staggering philosophical conclusion: our conscious perception is not a direct reflection of reality; it is merely a specialized, subjective overlay that our brain adds to raw, unconscious processing.
Core Findings: Vision
- Visual signals do not represent absolute physical reality; they measure relative differences in stimulation.
- Color perception is a subjective phenomenon heavily influenced by surrounding contexts, known as color contrast.
- Conscious object recognition and unconscious physical interaction are handled by entirely separate brain pathways.
- Motion is not an inherent property we passively witness; it is actively constructed by the brain, and can be lost if specific neural regions are damaged.
- Individuals can accurately process visual information without any conscious awareness of seeing it, proving that conscious perception is a highly selective brain construct.
Part 2: The Body Map and the Ghost in the Machine
The subjectivity of perception extends far beyond what we see; it fundamentally defines what we physically feel. Our somatic sensory system—the complex network of nerves and brain regions responsible for touch, temperature, and pain—often operates independently of the physical state of our bodies.
When we accidentally stub our toes or burn our fingers, we instinctively believe that the source of our pain is localized to those specific areas. However, advances in neuroscience reveal a more complex reality.
The human body is represented on the brain’s surface in a region known as the primary somatosensory cortex. This representation, or “map,” is not a precise scaling of our physical form; rather, it resembles a highly subjective and exaggerated caricature. Each part of the body is allocated a specific area on this cortical map. Still, the size and sensitivity of these regions do not correspond directly to the physical dimensions of the body parts themselves, leading to a fascinating, albeit distorted, representation of how we experience pain.
In the case of the somatic map, the distortion concerns not the size of the different parts of the body but their relative importance. For example, because we use our hands to manipulate objects, much more tissue is devoted to the hands than to the feet.
Passingham, 2016, p. 177
Feeling What Isn’t There: Phantom Limbs
The most striking demonstration of the subjective perception of our body’s reality is the phenomenon of “phantom limbs.” When an individual loses an arm or a leg, one might logically expect that they would no longer feel anything in that area, as the physical nerves have been permanently severed. Yet, the overwhelming majority of amputees continue to feel the missing limb, experiencing sensations ranging from a gentle itch to excruciatingly vivid pain.
How can a person feel a limb that physically does not exist? The answer lies in the stubborn persistence of the brain’s internal map.
Following the amputation of an extremity, nearly all patients have an illusion that the missing limb is still present.
…the central sensory processing apparatus continues to operate independently of the periphery, giving rise to these bizarre sensations.
Purves et al., 2004, p. 222
When a person who has lost their forearm touches the area where their limb once was, they often describe a peculiar sensation as if their missing fingers are being gently pressed. This intriguing phenomenon is supported by brain scans, which reveal that stimulating the stump activates the same area of the somatosensory cortex that previously corresponded to sensations from the absent hand.
This raises fascinating questions about the nature of our sensory experiences. If the brain’s central sensory processing can conjure the feeling of a limb that is no longer physically there, it suggests that our everyday physical sensations are not mere reflections of the external environment but rather complex, internal interpretations crafted by the mind. In essence, we don’t truly perceive our hand; instead, we experience our brain’s intricate representation of it.
Our awareness of our bodies is less about direct, factual reporting of reality and more about a narrative spun by the brain, bringing into focus the deeply subjective aspect of our physical existence.
The Blurring of Senses: Synaesthesia
For the majority of us, our sensory experiences are distinct and well-defined, allowing us to navigate the world with clarity. However, because perception arises from complex internal neural processes, these sensory boundaries can occasionally become indistinct, leading to extraordinary, unique subjective experiences.
This phenomenon is vividly illustrated in individuals with synaesthesia, a condition where the brain intertwines different sensory modalities. For example, they might perceive vibrant colors swirling into view when notes of music fill the air or when they scan the pages of a book. These overlapping sensations create a rich tapestry of experience that is entirely personal and can vastly differ from one individual to another.
When synaesthetes are placed in brain scanners and asked to listen to spoken words, their visual color centers (specifically an area known as V4/V8) light up with activity, even though there is no color in the room. Functional imaging has localized this speech-evoked response to area V4/V8 in the left hemisphere, overlapping with the region activated in non-synaesthetes by real color, and showing no activity in the primary visual cortex (Nunn et al., 2002). To a synaesthete, the color of a specific sound is a concrete, objective fact of their universe. The so-called diffusion-weighted imaging reveals that synaesthetes exhibit abnormally strong connections between brain regions responsible for analyzing shape and color (Passingham, 2016, p. 245).
Diffusion tensor imaging has revealed a remarkable enhancement in white matter coherence within the inferior temporal cortex of synaesthetes, particularly in the region close to the fusiform gyrus. This imaging study identified the most significant differences among individuals who perceive color in their external environment (Rouw & Scholte, 2007).
For these individuals, their subjective experience of reality is profoundly transformed, a phenomenon attributed to the unique neural wiring that characterizes their brain pathways.
The Philosophical Implication: The Mind’s Control Over Pain
If feeling is constructed in the brain, can the brain edit out physical trauma? Neuroscience answers with a resounding yes. Pain is highly subjective and easily manipulated by attention.
In an experiment conducted by Christian Büchel, individuals were placed in a brain scanner and subjected to a painful stimulus on their backs. Simultaneously, they were given a demanding auditory memory task. The researchers found that when the subjects were highly distracted by the mental task, the activation in the sensory pathways of their spinal cord actually decreased, and the subjects reported feeling less pain (Passingham, 2016, p. 299).
Independent work combining whole-brain and spinal-cord imaging has since shown that this attentional analgesia depends on an opioidergic descending pathway from the anterior cingulate through the periaqueductal grey and rostral ventromedial medulla, and that blocking the body’s own opioids abolishes the effect (Oliva et al., 2022).
The top-down signals that emanate from the prefrontal cortex possess a remarkable ability to suppress incoming sensory inputs. This process triggers the release of opiates within the nervous system, which serve to reduce our perception of pain significantly.
Our understanding of reality is shaped not merely by the events occurring around us, but by where we choose to direct our attention.
Core Findings: Somatic Sensation
- The brain’s map of the body prioritizes highly used areas (like hands) over actual physical size, creating a distorted internal representation of physical reality.
- Following amputation, the central nervous system continues to operate independently, generating the powerful illusion of a phantom limb.
- Physical sensations are perceived in the brain, not in the extremities; stimulating the stump of an amputee activates the brain’s representation of the missing hand.
- Synaesthesia demonstrates that sensory boundaries are subjective, caused by unique neural wiring that blends auditory and visual realities.
- Pain is not an absolute physical given; it can be actively suppressed by the brain’s prefrontal cortex when attention is diverted elsewhere.
Part 3: The Fragility of Memory and the Reconstructed Past
Just as our sensory experiences are dynamically woven together in the immediacy of the present, so too is our understanding of time and the past intricately shaped. We often envision memory as a static repository, akin to a mental hard drive or a dusty library filled with forgotten tomes, where one can effortlessly retrieve the precise details of a childhood event or recall what we consumed for breakfast last Tuesday.
Yet, the reality of memory is much more intricate than it seems. Memories are not merely pulled from a mental archive; instead, they are vividly reimagined every time we bring them to mind. Our current feelings, viewpoints, and life experiences influence this process.
Each time we remember, we don’t simply access a file; we engage in a rich act of re-creation, where our past is imbued with fresh meanings and subtle shades, reflecting the evolution of who we are in the present moment.
Patient Jon and the Two Memory Systems
To understand memory’s subjective nature, we must recognize that the brain handles the past using entirely distinct biological systems. The brain differentiates between “semantic” memory (knowledge of facts, like the function of a spanner) and “episodic” memory (the personal, autobiographical events of our lives).
This distinction is highlighted by the case of Patient Jon, studied by Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (Passingham, 2016, p. 289). Jon suffered a stroke at birth that caused a loss of neurons in his posterior hippocampus. Because of this, Jon is severely amnesic for personal past events; he cannot remember where he went on holiday or who visited him recently. When asked, he reports an inability to conjure or relive past experiences.
Yet, astonishingly, Jon attended normal schools and acquired semantic knowledge without issue. His temporal lobes and perirhinal cortex—the areas responsible for factual knowledge—were undamaged.
Jon’s case shows that remembering our personal history is a highly specialized biological function dependent on the hippocampus to provide spatial context.
The Illusion of Re-experiencing
When we experience an event, various parts of the cerebral cortex are activated. When we remember that event, the brain attempts to recreate that original pattern of neural activity. Richard Passingham, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist, explains the neurological basis of remembering a past event:
It is reinstatement that underlies the subjective feeling of re-experiencing the event.
Passingham, 2016, p. 206
During a study in which individuals were scanned while viewing videos and later recalled them, researchers found that the brain attempts to reinstate the specific state it was in during the original viewing. This reinstatement occurs in the hippocampus, retrosplenial cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and parietal cortex.
Multivoxel pattern studies have shown that the specific visual content a person retrieves can be decoded from early visual cortex, that this retrieval pattern resembles the one evoked during actual viewing, and that hippocampal activity tracks the strength of this cortical reinstatement trial by trial (Bosch et al., 2014).
Electrophysiological work further indicates that hippocampal pattern completion triggers cortical reinstatement between roughly 500 and 1500 milliseconds after a cue, and that this reinstatement gives rise to the subjective feeling of recollection (Staresina & Wimber, 2019).
The process of “reinstatement” is delicate and deeply subjective. As the brain engages in the intricate task of reconstructing a memory, it pulls together fragments of neural activity that are dispersed throughout the cortex.
This reconstruction renders the memory incredibly vulnerable to alterations and distortions. Rather than functioning like a simple video playback, it resembles a theatrical performance—each time it is recalled, it is acted out anew on the mental stage, shaped by the nuances of context, emotions, and thoughts at that moment.
The Philosophical Implication: The Eyewitness Problem
The subjective and reconstructive nature of memory has profound philosophical and practical implications, particularly in the realm of law and eyewitness testimony. Every time a witness reinstates a memory, the neural pathways are activated and made vulnerable to current emotions, leading questions, and newly acquired information.
Furthermore, as we age, memory becomes even more vulnerable. Alzheimer’s disease causes a loss of volume in the hippocampus years before memory problems become obvious. Because the hippocampus fundamentally represents the spatial location of the individual, patients with Alzheimer’s not only lose their autobiographical past, but they also lose their sense of where they are in the present.
Without an intact neural framework to build the context of reality, the subjective perception of the self begins to dissolve.
The same fragility shadows any attempt to know another mind from the outside. If a person’s own memory is a reconstruction open to distortion, then a second party’s confident reading of that person’s experience is a reconstruction at one further remove—a point worth holding onto as we turn to how the brain builds not just memories, but values and judgments.
Core Findings: Memory
- Autobiographical (episodic) memory and factual (semantic) memory rely on completely distinct anatomical systems.
- Damage to the hippocampus can permanently erase a person’s ability to mentally re-experience their past, while leaving their factual intelligence perfectly intact.
- Memory is not a video playback; it is the active neural reinstatement of past cortical activity.
- The subjective feeling of “reliving” an event relies on this fragile reinstatement process, making our personal histories highly vulnerable to distortion.
- The hippocampus provides the essential spatial context for our memories; its deterioration in Alzheimer’s disease strips away both the past and the present sense of location.
Part 4: The Emotional Filter, Morality, and the Subjective Self
If we contemplate the nature of our vision, touch, and memories as intricate, personal constructs shaped by our individual experiences, we must also consider the foundation of our logic. We often take pride in our identity as rational beings, with the ability to interpret the world around us objectively and to make decisions based on concrete facts.
However, recent findings in neuroscience suggest a far more complex reality. They reveal that our understanding and perception of the world are inextricably linked to our deeply ingrained emotions, mental representations, and subjective values. This intertwined relationship indicates that what we consider to be rational thought is often influenced—perhaps even overshadowed—by our feelings, thoughts, and personal biases. In cognitive neuroscience, this is called the top-down architecture of perception or active perception.
Our mental/emotional state serves as a potent filter through which we view the world, influencing our rational thoughts, shaping our decision-making processes, and coloring our interpretations of the actions of those around us.
The brain’s prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in continuously assessing new information, assigning subjective value to each piece based on our personal goals and underlying desires. This intricate evaluation process ensures that our feelings not only inform our perceptions but also guide our choices, weaving a complex tapestry of mental and emotional interplay.
Perception as Active Inference — and Why It Applies to Both People in the Room
Before we ask how the brain assigns worth to a drink or weighs a moral choice, it helps to see how it handles something far simpler: a line, a face, a surface. The everyday assumption is that perception is a kind of measurement — the eyes report what is there and the mind reads off the result.
A century of work on visual illusion says otherwise. Perception is closer to an unconscious inference, in which the brain meets incoming data with hypotheses drawn from prior experience. Following Helmholtz, Richard Gregory described visual perceptions as “unconscious inferences from sensory data,” regarded as “similar to predictive hypotheses of science” (Gregory, 1997, Summary).
The hollow-mask illusion is a clean demonstration — shown the concave inside of a mask, observers see a normal convex face, because the “bias of seeing faces as convex is so strong it counters” the depth information arriving from the eyes (Gregory, 1997, §2). What we see is the brain’s best hypothesis, not a transcript of the light.
This reframes the brain itself. Rather than a “passive, stimulus-driven device”, it is better understood as an active, predictive organ that anticipates its input (Engel, Fries, & Singer, 2001, Abstract). The anticipation is measurable, and it runs ahead of the stimulus. Expectations formed before a stimulus arrives shape what is then perceived: the brain comes to “build expectations about forthcoming sensory information” (Summerfield & de Lange, 2014, p. 745).
Those expectations have a neural signature with a measurable head start; the orbitofrontal cortex generates an early “initial guess” about an object, with differential activity appearing roughly “50 ms earlier” than in recognition-related temporal regions (Bar et al., 2006, pp. 449, 451). And the system is not fixed: visual neurons act as “adaptive processors”, their response properties changing with the task the perceiver is performing (Gilbert & Li, 2013, pp. 350, 354). Perception, in short, is built predictively, from priors, weighted by the current goal.
The studies above concern vision and perceptual decision. That the same constructive logic reaches thought, value, and feeling is a step beyond what any one of them demonstrates—a reading this article advances, and grounds in its own evidence below.
The Clinical Argument: Both People in the Room Are Constructing
For a therapist, the consequence is symmetrical and easy to miss. If perception is a prediction shaped by prior experience, this is as true of the therapist as of the client. The therapist’s reading of what a client feels, means, or “really” wants is itself a constructed hypothesis, assembled from the therapist’s own priors — not a direct observation of the client’s interior.
Stated plainly: a therapeutic style that tells clients what they really feel, or what they ought to feel, treats the therapist’s prediction as privileged access to another mind. The science of perception gives no warrant for that privilege. The more defensible stance treats the therapist’s reading as a hypothesis to be tested against the client’s own account, held with the awareness that it, too, is a construction.
From Constructing What We See to Constructing What We Value
The predictive architecture outlined previously operates continuously, even when the focus shifts away from recognizing faces or surfaces and instead delves into the realms of personal preferences, risk assessments, or moral beliefs. The same neuroanatomical foundations that facilitate the perception of physical objects are also engaged in the formation of emotions. This intricate system uses similar cognitive and neural processes to interpret not only what we see but also how we feel and judge in complex emotional and ethical scenarios.
An instance of emotion:
is constructed the same way that all other perceptions are constructed.
Barrett, 2017, p. 8
On this account, emotions “are constructions of the world, not reactions to it” (Barrett, 2017, p. 16) — the brain meets incoming signals with predictions and resolves them into a felt state, exactly as it resolves ambiguous light into a seen object.
Value is handled the same way. A coordinate-based meta-analysis of 206 functional imaging studies found that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior ventral striatum “appear to constitute a ‘valuation system,’ carrying a domain-general SV signal” (Bartra, McGuire, & Kable, 2013, p. 412) — a common internal scale on which a drink, a gamble, or an outcome of a therapist’s guidance is weighted, rather than a property read off the thing itself.
That weighting often runs beneath awareness: in the somatic-marker framework, emotion-related signals “can be nonconscious: they can bias behavior” even when a person is unaware of them (Reimann & Bechara, 2010, p. 767).
And what holds for value holds for moral judgment, where the verdict tends to arrive before the argument — moral reasoning is “usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached” (Haidt, 2001, p. 814), the felt conclusion coming first and the justification assembled afterward.
The shape of the claim is the one established for perception: what reaches us as “how things are” — whether a color, a choice, a worth, or a conviction — is the output of a constructive brain, not an objective transcript of the world.
Imaging of moral judgment makes the same point at the level of the dilemma: moral dilemmas “vary systematically in the extent to which they engage emotional processing” (Greene et al., 2001, p. 2105), and those that do recruit medial frontal, posterior cingulate, and bilateral angular regions that “were significantly more active in the moral-personal condition” (Greene et al., 2001, p. 2107) — emotional engagement, not detached calculation, tracking the moral verdict.
The Pepsi Challenge in the Brain
Subjective preference is hardwired into the prefrontal cortex (though it can still be altered). Consider the famous “Pepsi challenge.” When individuals who prefer Pepsi are scanned while drinking it, they show heightened activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. One might assume this means a preference for Pepsi is an objective biological trait. However, when individuals who prefer Coca-Cola drink, the same area lights up (Passingham, 2016, p. 311).
The brain scan fails to demonstrate any objective advantage of one beverage over another; instead, it emphasizes individual preferences. This process reveals how the brain interprets external stimuli, converting them into a nuanced internal scale of value that reflects each person’s unique tastes and experiences, which is completely beyond what an outside observer thinks or feels on the subject.
Risky Decisions and Missing Intuition
Because reality is filtered through this subjective value system, damage to the brain’s emotional centers destroys a person’s ability to make rational choices in the real world.
Researchers Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio studied patients with lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex using the “Iowa Gambling Task” (Passingham, 2016, p. 267). In this task, individuals choose from four decks of cards to win points. Some decks offer big gains but catastrophic long-term losses.
Healthy individuals quickly learn to avoid the risky decks because their brains generate an unconscious, emotional warning signal—measured as a spike in palm sweat, or skin conductance response—just before they reach for a bad deck. They are subconsciously imagining the negative outcome.
In the original study, patients with prefrontal damage, unlike controls, continued to select from the disadvantageous decks and remained “oblivious to the future consequences of their actions” (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994).
Patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage lack this anticipatory sweat response entirely. Without the emotional, subjective weight of imagining future loss, they continue to pull from the risky decks, ultimately losing the game. Objective facts (the mathematical losses) are useless to them without the subjective, emotional filter (conditioned by the brain damage) to give those facts meaning.
The Philosophical Implication: The Biology of Morality
Perhaps the most staggering revelation regarding the subjectivity of human perception is its role in morality. Moral rules are not objective truths existing out in the universe; they are biological phenomena born from our subjective ability to simulate the feelings of others.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is activated not just when we imagine outcomes for ourselves, but when we imagine how others will feel in emotional situations. Stephen Anderson and Antonio Damasio described the haunting cases of two patients who suffered damage to this exact area during early childhood (Anderson, Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1999). The consequences were devastating:
They stole, lied, and were impervious to punishment; in general, they showed a lack of guilt about their actions.
(Passingham, 2016, p. 299)
Furthermore, when adult patients with similar brain damage are presented with agonizing moral dilemmas—such as being asked how appropriate it is to flip a switch that kills their own daughter to save five anonymous workers—they are far more likely than healthy people to make cold, utilitarian choices (Passingham, 2016, p. 301).
In a controlled study, six patients with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal damage produced an abnormally high rate of utilitarian endorsements specifically on emotionally aversive “personal” dilemmas, while judging impersonal and non-moral scenarios normally (Koenigs et al., 2007).
Without an intact ventromedial prefrontal cortex, they cannot subjectively simulate the emotional devastation of the act. Morality, therefore, is not an objective law of nature. It relies entirely on the subjective mechanism of empathy—our biological ability to project our own emotional reality onto others.
A Necessary Caution: Constructed Is Not Arbitrary
The research findings in neuroscience do not support the idea that all interpretations are equally valid, given that perception is largely constructed by internal brain processes. The constructive nature of perception carries a certain rigor that can easily be overlooked. While expectations can influence how we interpret sensory input, they do not completely alter the incoming information; instead, they often guide what conclusions the perceiver chooses to draw from it.
In an examination of how expectations influence decision-making processes, a study by Bang and Rahnev (2017) revealed intriguing insights. It indicated that when individuals have a certain expectation about a stimulus, it changes their decision-making criteria without affecting the actual sensory information they receive (stimulus expectation “alters decision criterion but not sensory signal in perceptual decision making” (Bang & Rahnev, 2017, p. 1). This means that while the threshold for making a judgment is adjusted by prior knowledge or expectations, the sensory evidence itself remains unchanged.
This distinction holds significant importance within the consulting room. When we assert that preconceived notions or prior-driven predictions influence a client’s experiences, we are not suggesting that their perceptions are merely illusions or that the therapist has the right to impose their own interpretation in place of the client’s genuine understanding. Rather, it is important to recognize that the brain’s ingrained expectations can skew one’s judgment, yet they do not override or eliminate the actual evidence of the client’s feelings and experiences.
A clinical perspective grounded in this scientific understanding simultaneously acknowledges two important ideas.
First, it recognizes that a person’s perceptions, values, and emotions are not fixed; rather, they are shaped through ongoing experiences and can be genuinely re-evaluated and transformed over time.
Second, this process of construction is not limitless; it is shaped by the tangible realities of the world around us and the inherent qualities of our bodies, which continually respond and resist.
One of the primary objectives of this article is to thoughtfully question and let go of outdated beliefs and assumptions—those ingrained priorities that no longer serve us well. This process aims to explore alternative perspectives while respectfully acknowledging the validity of our personal experiences. It recognizes that while these previous beliefs may have shaped our understanding, they do not absolutely define our truths or the complexity of our realities.
Core Findings: Emotion and Morality
- The ventromedial prefrontal cortex assigns subjective value to our experiences, activating identically for totally different personal preferences.
- Rational decision-making requires subjective, emotional signals; without them, patients repeatedly take catastrophic risks.
- The ability to follow moral rules relies heavily on our brain’s capacity to subjectively imagine the emotional states of others.
- Early childhood damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex can result in a complete absence of guilt and empathy.
- Patients with specific prefrontal damage make cold, utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas because they cannot subjectively simulate emotional devastation.
Conclusion: The Tailored Experience
To say that human perception is subjective is not to say that the physical world is an illusion, but rather that our experience of the world is a highly curated, uniquely biological masterpiece. Our brains are machines, evolved not to give us a perfect, objective reflection of the universe, but to provide us with a useful, navigable interpretation of it.
From the contextual interpretation of photons hitting our retinas to the phantom sensations of limbs long gone; from the fragile, theatrical reconstructions of our memories to the mental/emotional filters that give birth to our morality—our minds, conditioned by the brain, are constantly interpreting, editing, and simulating the data they receive. Even our conscious sense of “self,” our feeling of making choices in real-time, is a brilliantly executed, slightly delayed subjective narrative conditioned by our neural circuitry.
We all walk through the same physical universe. We bump into the same tables, drink the same Pepsi, breathe the same air, and look up at the same stars. But thanks to the magnificent, constructive power of the human brain, we each live in a subjective reality entirely our own.
It is our capacity for empathy—our biological ability to simulate (not directly perceive) the inner worlds of others—that bridges the gap between these billions of isolated, subjective realities, allowing us to build a shared human experience. This is also why certainty about another person’s inner world is the one thing science will not license: to simulate is not to see directly, and the most honest reading of someone else—in ordinary life as in any room where one person’s job is to understand another—is one held as a hypothesis, open to correction by the person whose mind it concerns.
Glossary: What Do These Brain Words Mean?
Neuroscience can sound complex, but the ideas are often simpler than the terminology. Here’s a plain-English explanation of the key terms used in this paper.
Lateral occipital complex — A small area near the back of your brain that helps you recognize what shapes are. It’s “the area that is activated when other people recognize objects” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 2, “Parallel pathways”). Think of it as your brain’s “what is that thing?” detector.
Ventral stream / Dorsal stream — Two separate “roads” your brain uses for seeing. The ventral stream (bottom road) figures out what something is — its shape and identity. The dorsal stream (top road) helps your hand move toward it and grab it, even without you thinking about it. “Only the dorsal one has direct connections with the areas in the frontal lobe that control movement” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 2).
Middle temporal complex — A part of the brain that notices when things are moving. If it gets damaged, a person can still see an object’s shape perfectly but sees movement as a series of snapshots instead of smooth motion — like “a series of separate images, as if a film had been slowed down until it was a succession of stills” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 2).
Primary visual cortex (V1) — The very first stop in the brain for information coming from your eyes. Damage here can cause total blindness in part of your vision — but, weirdly, some people can still “guess” what’s there because “visual information can still reach the cortex through routes that bypass the primary visual cortex” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 2). That strange ability is called blindsight.
Primary somatosensory cortex (S1) — The “body map” area of your brain — and part of the larger somatosensory cortex, the brain region that handles touch, temperature, and pain signals from your whole body. Every part of your skin has its own little spot here. Still, the map isn’t drawn to real size — “because we use our hands for manipulating objects, much more tissue is devoted to the hand than to the foot” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 2). So your hands get a much bigger “billboard” in your brain than your feet do, even though your feet are bigger.
Hippocampus — A small, curved brain structure (named after its seahorse shape) that’s essential for remembering personal events from your life and for knowing where you are. People with hippocampus damage, like Patient Jon, are “severely amnesic for past events in their life” even though their general knowledge stays fine (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 4, “From places to recollection”).
Posterior hippocampus — The back part of the hippocampus. Damage there specifically affects memory for personal past events — exactly the part that was injured in Patient Jon’s case.
Temporal lobes — The side parts of your brain (roughly behind your ears) that store a lot of your general knowledge about the world — facts, words, what things are.
Perirhinal cortex — A small area tucked next to the hippocampus that holds detailed factual/semantic knowledge — like knowing what a spanner is for, even if you can’t remember the last time you used one.
Retrosplenial cortex / Posterior cingulate cortex / Parietal cortex — A group of brain areas that work together with the hippocampus when you “replay” a memory. Researchers found that “there were many areas in which the state at viewing was reinstated at recall. These included the hippocampus, retrosplenial cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and the medial and inferior parietal cortex” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 4). In simple terms: remembering something is like your brain hitting “replay” across several regions at once.
Prefrontal cortex — The area right behind your forehead. It’s involved in decision-making, planning, controlling attention, and figuring out what things are worth to you.
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) — A specific part of the prefrontal cortex, tucked low and in the middle. It lights up whenever you experience something you like — even something as simple as your favorite soda: “there is more activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex… when they drink Pepsi rather than Coca-Cola” for Pepsi-lovers, and the same area for Coca-Cola-lovers when they drink their favorite (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 6, “The Pepsi Challenge”). This area also matters for caring about other people — research on patients with damage here found that vmPFC damage decreased prosociality across behavioral and computational measures, with patients earning less and exerting less effort for others (Lockwood et al., 2024, Abstract). So this part of the brain helps you both enjoy things and care about others.
V4/V8 — A brain area that “lights up” when you see (or imagine) color. In people with synaesthesia, this area activates even when they’re just hearing words, because “synaesthetes reported seeing colors when they heard words and when they were scanned there was a corresponding activation in the visual area V4/V8” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 3).
Diffusion-weighted imaging — A brain-scanning technique that maps the “wiring” — the actual connections — between brain areas, by tracking how water moves along nerve fibers. It’s been used to show that synaesthetes have stronger-than-normal connections between brain areas for shape and color (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 3).
Supplementary motor area / Pre-supplementary motor area — Two small areas near the top-middle of your brain that get busy preparing a movement before you’re even consciously aware you’ve “decided” to move. In Libet’s famous experiment, brain activity here showed up “between 300 and 700 milliseconds before the people were aware of their decision to move their finger” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 7; primary study: Libet et al., 1983).
Multi-voxel pattern analysis — A computer technique scientists use on brain-scan data to spot tiny patterns of activity that predict what someone is about to do — sometimes before the person themselves knows. Using this method, researchers “predict better than chance which of the two movements the person was going to make, and to do this seconds in advance” (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 7; primary study: Soon et al., 2008).
Skin conductance response — A tiny change in how sweaty your palms get, measured by how well your skin conducts electricity. It’s an early-warning sign your brain sends out before you consciously feel nervous — for example, “there is an SCR just before people choose from the risky pack” in a card-gambling game (Passingham, 2016, Ch. 6).
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