Exploring the perceptual canvas of signal evolution: comment on Kelley and Kelley

摘要

Albert Einstein once famously remarked that “reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” In the hallmark of Einstein, this simple phrase encapsulates worlds of conceptual complexity across physics, biology, psychology, and philosophy. From a biological perspective, the essence of this idea is that an individual’s perceptual reality presents a mere caricature of its objectively verifiable existence. This can be readily appreciated through situations where individual perception obviously departs from objective reality, as in the case of many popular human visual (optical) illusions. Such images intrigue us because our perception of them so starkly contrasts with our cognitive understanding of what is actually true. That is, they reveal how our brains can err in making sense of the world around us.