metaverse: multisensory immersion experience in a virtual universe through various devices and technological developments.
Some large companies, such as Zara, Coca Cola and Nissan, or even some law firms, are already studying how to create a virtual world that simulates reality and in which subjects can experience the results of their decisions and behavior without being compromised. factually. Video games were the advancement of these gadgets involving characters with whom the player can identify. Now it is about the characters of that virtual universe being the players themselves.
The clients of said and other companies that adhere to the formula will be able to request the construction of the metaverse that best suits their needs or business and recreate it as a game or test area of their convenience before moving on to reality itself. Building a metaverse does not stop being the use of the impressive imaginative capacity of the human mind, which already lives its own virtual world, and that in these lines we want to make known. If the metaverse is the illusory experience of a world that does not really exist, the human mind is very much a metaverse, an illusion, a personal interpretation of reality. Let’s see it.
To begin with, we feel that we live in our body, that is, that the mind is inseparable from the body, an illusion that easily vanishes when the experiencer desynchronizes what we see with what we touch, creating an out-of-body perception, the feeling that the mind leaves the body. body seeing ourselves in the distance, as another person would see us. The experiments of researcher Henrik Ehrsson, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, even go so far as to make a person feel that his mind inhabits non-biological contraptions, like the plastic body of a Barbie doll. But it is only an illusion, perhaps the greatest, that the human brain is capable of creating.
Likewise, we feel that light and colors are out there, filling the universe and the environment in which we live, and that our eyes only capture it in order to perceive it. Or we also believe that the smell comes from the cup of hot coffee and we perceive it when it reaches our nostrils. But it turns out that none of that is true, because light does not exist outside of us and our mind, that is, outside of our particular metaverse, being the brain the one that creates it when it receives the torrent of small electrical discharges from the neurons of the nerve. optical, caused in turn by the impact on our eyes of the electromagnetic energy that floods the universe and that we, illusorily, feel as if it were light itself. Similarly, the smell is not out there, it is just the effect on the brain of the electrical discharges that travel down the olfactory nerves when our nose receives the hot coffee molecules coming out of the cup. The sounds, the music that we hear, do not flood the auditorium either when the orchestra performs a composition, since it is the brain that creates them by receiving the nerve impulses that the vibrations of the air particles that originate the musical instruments provoke in the auditory nerves when they reach our eardrums.
No less credible is the feeling that it is the hand that feels the touch or the temperature of the object it touches, when in reality it is the brain that, so to speak, feels that touch, but, we do not know how, creates the illusion of what the hand does. That is why people who, due to an accident or illness, suffer the amputation of a hand can continue to feel the touch in that hand that they no longer have, since the neurons in their brain continue to do this work for some time after the amputation. It is the well-known phantom limb illusion.
Neuroscience has not yet been able to explain why our perception of the world in which we live does not fracture or break down, as happens when the actor’s voice does not coincide with the movements of his lips in the cinema or on television, since the changes in movement , sound, color, shape, etc., of each image or situation that we perceive are not processed by the brain at the same speed, with some changes being processed more quickly than others, which, in theory, would imply a permanent desynchronization of our perceptions. Thus, perceptive integration in our mind is another of the great illusions that the human brain creates.
But our personal metaverse is not a whim of nature, since all those mentioned are practical illusions that make life easier for us. Feeling, for example, that it is the hand that touches, we will not stop reaching with it for the pen to write or the key to open the door of the house, behaviors that are more difficult to achieve if we had those feelings in our own brain. The reader can also imagine how complicated it would be to move around the world feeling out of our body. The wise nature immerses us in a mental metaverse that makes life easier for us, in addition to recreating in that same universe the illusion that the world in which we live is impregnated with light, color, sounds, smells and flavors.
Ignacio Morgado Bernal He is Emeritus Professor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience and at the Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is the author of “The Factory of Illusions: Getting to know each other better to be better” (Ariel, 2015).
Gray matter it is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.
You can follow MATTER on Facebook, Twitter and Instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
