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"We don't see with our eyes, we see with our minds"

At the time I heard this in class, I was intrigued by the implications--that perhaps reality as we know it/perceive it is subjective if we are operating under the idea that no two brains, and therefore, no two minds are the same. I then came across an article from Medical News Today (link provided below) that disturbed me. The article, Hollow Mask Illusion Fails To Fool Schizophrenia Patients, concerned a joint British and German study on the effects of optical illusions on patients diagnosed with Schizophrenia. With the "hollow mask illusion" (youtube link provided) as a test example, both control (non-Schizophrenic) and experimental groups were shown a series of images containing hollow (mask) and normal faces while inside an fMRI machine. The aim of the subjects was to distinguish between which images were of the hollow, concave insides of masks and which were normal, convex faces. As expected a staggering divide was established: all 16 control subjects percieved the hollow mask as normal faces (99% error rate) while all 13 of the experimental group better identified which faces were of hollow masks with only a 6 error rate. As mentioned in the article, Schizophrenia has been attributed to the disconnectivity between the parietal cortex, reponsible for spatial perception (a top-down control) and the lateral occipital cortex, responsible for processing visual information (a bottom-up control). This was evidenced by the fMRI scans of the experimental group. If the aformentioned two regions of the brain are not talking to each other yet these patients are unfooled by optical illusions while non-Schizophrenic people are duped, what does this say about our realities? In the way we percieve the world, is it that our brains are playing tricks on us? And far more disturbing, do Schizophrenic patients see more of the truth than we, non-Schizophrenic people do?

Hollow Mask Illusion Fails To Fool Schizophrenia Patients

Hollow Mask Illusion