As we learned in class, there are more connections in the brain than there are stars in the universe. This is a crazy idea to try and wrap your head around; there are so many little things happening inside our brains that we can’t imagine. Our consciousness is made up of all of these little connections, letting us experience everything. Even though our consciousness is such a powerful thing, we would be constantly overstimulated if we actually were able to see and experience all of reality at once. Instead, our brains work to only see one percent in reality and perceive the other ninety-nine percent. We are in a constant dance of ‘what I see, what I remember, and what I expect’ that gives us our sense of reality. Our consciousness is always working to perceive things that we are looking at, often warping reality. An example of this is how we view beauty between men and women. Even though we may think that we are thinking independently when we perceive someone as attractive or not, our consciousness is actually being affected by science and therefore affects what we are thinking. Males are inherently attracted to women with higher estrogen levels, which signifies femininity, attractiveness, and health. However, when women wear makeup, it can literally make up for lower estrogen levels. We see this a lot in celebrities when they change their appearance cosmetically to appear younger so that other people will perceive them as more attractive. This is only one example of how our consciousness and how we perceive things work against and with each other. I think the saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ fits this topic well. In this day and age, with all of the technology being developed, it becomes harder and harder to know what is reality and what we are only perceiving as reality based on the false surface being portrayed.
Koch, Christof. “What Is Consciousness?” Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/.
Yarosh, Daniel B. “Perception and Deception: Human Beauty and the Brain.” Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland), U.S. National Library of Medicine, 29 Mar. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6523404/.