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Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it."

"Schizophrenia is famous for its symptoms of hallucinations and delusions, but sufferers also face debilitating cognitive impairment-and standard treatments with antipsychotic medications do little to compensate for intellectual loss. Seeking improved mental clarity, many patients turn to a seemingly mundane source: cigarettes. The extraordinarily high incidence of smoking in individuals with schizophrenia-about 85 percent of patients smoke compared with some 20 percent of the general population-has spurred researchers to investigate the therapeutic effects of nicotine in the diseased brain."