http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=allIt's about a woman who had a head scratch that was so irritating she couldn't stop. But it has some really interesting things about the brain. Including a little snippet about how we view the world around us.
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.Basically what you view around you on a daily basis is potentially 90% memories, and only 10% real new data delivered to your brain. Perception is a strange thing to think about. That wall in your house that you just see out of the corner of your eye... probably just put there by your brain from what it remembers of the area on previous occasions that you walked through that room.