Scientist Brian Cox has come face-to-face with “aliens” to explore why our world looks as it does to us.

In reality, 99.99% of every object we can touch is empty space — including ourselves.

The sounds we hear are really vibrations travelling through space.

And everything we see is merely a mental construct based on how our brains interpret light waves.

He discovered a flathead catfish which “sees” the world through the sense of taste — its skin being akin to "one big tongue".

He also caught a mantis shrimp — an animal with the ability to see colours beyond our imagining, from ultraviolet to far-red.

But most stunningly, Prof Cox confronted one of the world’s most intelligent animals — the octopus.

And the tentacled beast, with sophisticated camera eyes like ours, evolved completely separately from our own evolutionary tree.

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