The Invention of Reality: How the Brain Learns to See - Yuval Porat (PhD)

Open your eyes. What do you see? A room, a face, a glass of wine? We assume that vision is a passive act - like a camera capturing a photograph of the world around us.

We are wrong.

Neuroscience reveals that "seeing" is not merely receiving light; it is an active, chaotic construction of reality. But what happens when that construction process is broken? And what happens when it is turned on for the very first time?

In this talk, neuroscientist Yuval Porat (PhD) takes us deep into the mechanics of perception, drawing on his fieldwork in Ethiopia with children who regained their sight after years of blindness. The surgeries were a medical success, but they revealed a neurological mystery: The eyes were open, but the brain did not know how to "see."

Yuval reveals that repairing the eye is only the beginning. He will walk us through the journey of these children as their brains struggled to turn raw sensory data into a meaningful world. It is a story that proves the hardware (the eye) is useless without the software (the brain).

This talk invites you to question everything you think you see. Is the visual world something we discover, or something we create? How much of our reality comes from the outside, and how much comes from within? Join us for a rare blend of hard science, human story, and the philosophical question of what it actually means to see.

About the speaker

Yuval Porat, PhD, is a neuroscientist specializing in human cognition and visual perception. He earned his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he led the MRI Unit at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC).

His work explores the mechanism of reality: how the brain transforms sensory input into meaningful internal representations. Yuval is passionate about making neuroscience accessible, believing that understanding how the brain constructs our reality can inspire curiosity and a new way of seeing the world.

Doors open at 19:30 – Arrive early, grab a seat, and settle in.

Talk starts at 20:00 and runs until around 21:30.

Price includes light drinks.

Stick around afterward - good conversations don’t have closing times.