Reality is a Shared Hallucination

Individual perception untainted by others' infuence does not exist.
What do I mean when I say that? I mean exactly what it says.
Memory is the core of what we call reality.
Think about this for a second...
What do you actually hear right now and see? This page. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know as sure as the day you were born, that out of sight there are other rooms, mere steps away- perhaps the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and a hall. What makes you so sure that they exist? Nothing but your memory. Nothing else at all.Your also reasonably certain that theres a broader world outside. you know that your school, if you are away from it, still awaits your entry. You can picture the roads you use to get to it, visualize the public foyer and the classrooms, see in your minds eye the path to your own locker, and know where most of the things inside it are placed. Then there are the companions which enrich your life- family, workmates, neighbors, friends, boyfriends, and even people you are fond of that you havent spoken to in a year or two- a few of whom, if any, are currently in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. Ant this instant, reading by yourself, where do the realities of galaxies and friends reside? Only in the chambers of your mind. Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory.
In an experiment in the 1970's, Elizabeth Loftus, one of the worlds premier memory researchers showed college students a moving picture of a traffic accident. After the film, the students were asked simple questions like, " How fast was the white sports car going" or, "What color hair did the person have who was driving?" 17% said they saw a barn, though there wasnt any. And although the bicycle in the accident film was driven by a brunette over half insisted that the driver was blonde. They remembered the non-existant blonde vividly, so much so, that when shown the same film a month later with a brunette clearly driving, they started saying that the film wasnt the same one. That they vividly remember the blonde, and that this was some sort of trick. Which clearly shows that our own memory can decieve us.
In another test, students were shown blue slides and asked anounce what color they saw. Most said blue, but a few radicals in the back shouted green. Arguments arose as to what color the slides were and later when the students were tested, most still said that they were blue. But strangely, when students were taken in to seperate rooms and asked the same question, a considerable percentage suggested that now the slides were more green. even the students who had refused to see green ended up going along with the vocal but phony greenness. Why is this? A few people in the room had actually "colored" thier perception. The words of just one determined speaker had penetrated the most intimate sanctums of the eye and brain.
One year olds show wys in which their minds are slaves to social commands. Children go with the herd even in their tastes in food. Even rhythm draws individuals perceptions together in the subtlest ways. A student studying underneath Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping around in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed to be superficially marching to thier own drummer. But analysis revealed that the group was rocking to a unified beat. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Without knowing it, she was the "director" and the "orchestrator" When they played a tune and rolled the tape, it looked as if each child were dancing to the melody. They had generated an unconcious undercurrent and synchronised movement, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves. In other words, without knowing it, we form a team.
Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of child hood authorities and heros, most come from our peers. A vast chorus of long gone ancients constitutes a not so slient majority whose legacy has the most dramatic affect of all on our vision of reality.
The perceptual influence of the mob that has gone before us and those who stand around us now can be mid boggling. The perception of middle age scholars are no more individualistic than yours and mine. Through our sentences and paragraphs, our history and heros, lnog-gone ghosts still have thier say within our collective minds.