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Re-creating the Real World (preview)

Scientific American - Posted: October 12th, 2012, 8:00am EDT

pIn the 1999 Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix , intelligent machines have imprisoned the human race in a state of virtual reality. They feed a computer program, the Matrix, into every brain to simulate an external real world and then harvest the imprisoned humansapos; biochemical electricity for their own energy needs. To the humans, their existence seems normal and mundane, but in fact, they are living an illusion./ppAlthough the Matrix is fictional, our mind runs on its own type of virtual reality. The brain creates a model of the world that we assume is accurate most of the time. Yet in numerous instances, it is not. Visual illusions vividly illustrate the brainapos;s mistaken interpretations. In some cases, it makes false assumptions about the world, distorting our perception./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=re-creating-the-real-world[More]/a

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