The article wrote:
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.
I found to be particularly interesting. I'd heard of phantom limb treatments before and had a loose understanding that we didn't directly perceive the input from our sense, but what really struck me was the part about creating perceptions from memory. I can remember times when I was touching myself--no, not like that--in odd ways--still not like that--and although I knew I was reprehensible for what was going on I couldn't really understand what part of my body was touching what. This would occur when I was lying in contorted positions, and so I had no sense of proprioception to help me construct an idea of where my body parts were.
