Publisher's Synopsis
Our world is an interesting one. If we don't keep our eyes open, we might miss a lot. We try to understand what happens around us as best as we can, but sometimes it is just too complicated. The tools we have at our disposal are effective, but still limited. Our eyes can see far enough to avoid immediate threats, but they can't see problems beyond our immediate visual scope. Additionally, they can't see many of the colours of the colour and light spectrum, limiting our visual array to what is essential, and nothing more. Our ears can hear what they need to, usually within a short area, and we are able to focus our hearing if we want to turn down the amount of distractions we have around us. These senses help us perceive the world around us, and most of the time they do a pretty good job. Once the sensory inputs from our sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste are processed in the brain, we make decisions about what to pay attention to in the environment around us, and thoughts start to form almost immediately about what we should or shouldn't do in that moment and the ones after. We make plans, take actions, and move based on the sensory inputs around us. Clearly they are important to how we perceive the world around us and what comes to define reality as we know it. Still, there is a lot of information we don't perceive. The things outside of our sensory inputs go unnoticed unless someone else can perceive them for us. As we perceive the world around us, we let some information in, while ignoring other information at the same time. If we didn't ignore some things, we might become overwhelmed with the sensory inputs, creating problems for our attention and making decisions based on the information we are receiving. We filter the important inputs easily and automatically so we don't even need to actively think about what is important and what is useless information. We arrived at this system after thousands of years of refining our senses and the way we perceive those inputs through evolution. Humans developed their senses in a focused and useful way so that they could improve their chances of survival and turn to the things that could improve their quality of life. Most modern humans don't even use most of the senses we have developed to their full capacity. Most people only have the senses that they need, and nothing more. As work has changed from hunting and gathering to writing and planning, most of the physical attributes and abilities of the past have changed slightly to accommodate modern needs. This means less strength and agility, and larger brains to fill with the information that we gather throughout our lives. What we perceive affects what our reality becomes and is in any timeframe. The things that we perceive are considered real to us, and therefore we define them as our reality. Together they compose the broader reality of our lives and define who we are and how we live. The definition of reality has not changed much over time. It has usually been defined as the things we can perceive with our sensory inputs, and this has usually focused on the sense of touch. Even through the stories in the Bible, believers were proven wrong when they didn't believe because they hadn't touched the resurrected Jesus. This is a fictional representation of the way the human mind works. Since it is easier to define the reality we know by the things that we can physically feel, we prefer to use the physical perception of the world as the definition of reality. This has largely been the thinking of humans to this point in history, and will likely continue for some time. As the myths of religions and the mystical vanish with scientific thought, evidence, and logical reasoning, our perception of reality has become even more important to what we define as our reality. Still, there are changes happening in the world of defining reality that could have significant effects on what we consider to be real, and what we don't.
