Living Inside a Filtered Reality

ARE WE HERE — OR JUST FILTERED We believe we see reality. Light enters the

eye, the brain decodes it, the world appears. Simple.

Familiar. Comfortable. But that’s not what’s happening. The human retina

contains over one hundred million photoreceptors, constantly sampling the environment.

Yet the optic nerve — the only route to the brain — carries roughly one million signals.

More than ninety-nine percent of visual information is discarded before it ever reaches awareness.

So what we experience is not reality. It is a selection. The eye compresses the world before

thought begins. Edges are kept. Motion is prioritized. Contrast is sharpened. Anything that doesn’t