our senses But there’s more tothem than that, according to Dr. Beau Lotto, who is wowing the scientific world with work that crosses the boundaries of art, neurology, natural history and philosophy.

What they reveal, he says, is that the whole world is the creation of our brain. What we see, what we hear, feel and what we think we know is not a photographic reflection of the word, but an instantaneous unthinking calculation as to what is the most useful way of seeing the world. It’s a bestguess based on the past experience of the individual, a long evolutionary past that has shaped the structure of our brains. The world is literally shaped by our pasts.

Dr. Lotto, 40, an American who is a reader in neuroscience at University College London, has set out to prove it in stunning visual illusions, sculptures and installations, which have been included in art-science exhibitions. He explains his complex ideas from the starting point of visualillusions, which far from revealing how fragile our senses are show how remarkably robust they are at providing a picture of the world that serves a purpose to us. For centuries, artists and scientists have noted that a grey dot looks lighter against a dark background than being against a light background. The conventional belief was that it was because of some way the brain and eye is intrinsically wired. But Dr. Lotto believesit’s a learnt response; in other words, we see the world not as it is but as it is useful to us.

“Context is everything, because our brains have evolved to constantly re-define normality,” says Dr. Lotto. “What we see is defined by our own experiences of the past, but also by what the human race has experienced through its history. ”

This is illustrated by the fact that different cultures and communities have different viewpoints of the world, conditioned over generations. For example, Japanese people have a famous inability to distinguish between the “R” and the “L” sound. This arises because in Japanese the sounds are totally interchangeable. “Differentiating between them has never been useful, so the brain has never learnt to do it. It’s not just that Japanese people find it hard to tell the difference. They literally cannot hear the difference.”

Dr. Lotto’s experiments are grounding more and more hypotheses in hard science. “Yes, my work is idea-driven,” he says. “But lots of research, such as MRI brain scanning, is technique-driven. I don’t believe you can understand the brain by taking it out of its natural environment and looking at it in a laboratory.You have to look at what it evolved to do, and look at it in relationship to its ecology. ”

According to the passage, what is known about Dr. Beau Lotto?