do we see things upside down

1 hour ago 2

Short answer: Yes, the image formed on your retina is upside down, but your brain processes it to appear upright. Here’s how it works.

Light entering the eye is bent by the cornea and the lens, producing an inverted image on the retina at the back of the eye. This is a physical property of how lenses bend light, not a conscious choice. The upside-down image is a direct consequence of light paths through curved surfaces. [one source reference]
The retina detects light but does not by itself decide orientation; it simply records the pattern of light photons as an image. The brain interprets this pattern to produce a stable perception of the world. [one source reference]

The visual signals from the retina are transmitted via the optic nerve to the visual cortex. Throughout early processing, the brain learns to map the inverted retinal image to a coherent, upright perception. This reorientation is a matter of neural interpretation rather than a literal flipping of a stored image. [one source reference]
Importantly, there is no separate “upside-down” memory being rotated in the brain; the brain builds a consistent understanding of space from ongoing sensory input and prior experience. [one source reference]

It’s a common belief that the brain physically rotates the image back to upright, but the accurate view is that perception emerges from patterns of neural activity that are interpreted as upright. The orientation becomes part of how the brain perceives space rather than a literal image being flipped. [one source reference]

People adapt to this orientation seamlessly; even when experimental goggles invert vision, the brain can recalibrate fairly quickly, restoring an upright perception with practice. This demonstrates the brain’s plasticity in constructing stable perception from sensory input. [one source reference]

If you’d like, I can pull up a couple of up-to-date sources or explain the key experiments that demonstrate this phenomenon in more detail.