Posted on 08/25/2019 5:04:26 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our minds eye, yet the brains visual system receives very little information from the world itself. Much of what we see we conjure in our heads.
A lot of the things you think you see youre actually making up, said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. You dont actually see them.
New research suggests mathematics is the key.
The visual cortex has a mind of its own.
You may think of the brain as taking a photograph of what you see in your visual field, Young said. But the brain doesnt take a picture, the retina does, and the information passed from the retina to the visual cortex is sparse.
They hope to decipher, for example, why we can perceive the flashes in a blinking traffic light, but we dont see the frame-by-frame action in a movie
(Excerpt) Read more at quantamagazine.org ...
That was fun!!!
That’s the basis of the numeric substitution cypher I use in a lot of my passwords. It isn’t hard for programs to solve numeric substitutions if you use it consistently. The key is to not use them consistently, mix up lower and upper case, and throw in some punctuation marks.
I understand you are making a pun.
I have read somewhere in the past that there are persons who are blind from birth that appear to have perfectly functional eyes and connections between the eyes and the visual cortex. The problem for them is that the visual cortex is not “on” to receive the nerve impulses and begin the visualization process.
The processing of information is definitely a “learned” thing. All you have to do is watch a new born infant figure out depth perception to see the inexperienced operator trying to figure out how to operate the various features of its body and interpret the sensory inputs being received. In fact, one of the early markers of infant brain development is how well they are able to reach out and accurately touch or grasp objects.
As for the article, there is no link to an academic article to see them discuss their work in depth.
The Quanta article gives no indication that they are considering the possibility that the visual picture is basically the biological version of a scan: an image methodically built one element (pixel) at a time with a specific refresh rate.
We already know the human visual system refresh rate is 32 frames per second (threshold rate for motion picture projection). If each location (element) in the visual cortex was being addressed in sequence, the limited number of nerves coming from the eye might be enough to load that element with the needed information to set its values before moving on to the next element. Sweep rate would be a function of the number of rows of rods and cones in the retina to be read in within the frame rate of 1/32th of a second.
The feedback mentioned in the article might contain a switching signal sent from the visual cortex to the retinas moving from one data input (rod or cone) point to the next. Even the notion of the visual cortex being a “mind within the mind” makes sense if you see it as an autonomous yet processing-intense, continuously-running function that the higher level cognitive areas of the brain do not want to be distracted by. (”Ralph, I’m sure how you did what you did is really neat, but I’m not interested in the details; just give me the data!”)
Heck, images in dreams might be nothing more than a fidgety, under occupied visual cortex rummaging through bits and pieces of stored visual data for something to process (helped along with some direction from what?... the subconscious?).
And hallucinations... “Mission control, we’ve got a problem.”
Conceptually, think of the old cathode ray tube (CRT) TV electron gun and yoke setup running in reverse. The picture on the screen being read to establish the settings of the yoke (where the electron gun is pointing (X,Y)) and the value settings (intensity and B/W/R/G/B) of the electron gun(s) and the data being sent down to the signal processor. Of course, CRT is very yesterday, today it’s LEDs in flat panels. Very thin. Compact. And flexible color screens are the newest innovation. However, image production is still the same: one pixel at a time, XY intensity BW RGB settings for each pixel, row upon row, all driven by the refresh rate which is now a lot more than the 32 frames per second minimum.
Imagine what many hundreds of millions of years of biological visual development in multiple, very competitive environments could produce.
Personally, my favorite eyes are those on the mantis shrimp. Nothing says “I’m a wild and crazy guy (or gal)!” like they do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGuZifKr0h4
https://www.noteloop.com/kit/display/color-space/
I was fortunate to work at Texas Instruments during a battle between Epson LCD projector technology and the TI DLP chip technology, centering mostly on the education market.
The speed of the DLP chip was increased to over 110,000 “flips” per second, well beyond what the eye can perceive. Yet anecdotal evidence suggested that a very few people were bothered by the mirror flips (~digital light) verses LCD cubes (~analog light).
That the eye and brain can “see” something so far beyond what the “design” of the eye should allow is fascinating and still under study.
The second article discusses a woman who has a fourth cone (a tetrachromat) which enables even more color perception. I have seen that about 2% of women have some Tetrachromatic vision.
It seems that women in general, see about 8 times the shades of red that any man can. Why else 100’s of red nail polishes for ladies to choose from?
The eye and brain combo is one of the most fascinating areas of research to me.
They are both male.
Interesting. Thank you.
Excellent.
For a moment, though, I thought you were a rapper....
;)
Heh
From what little I’ve seen of SE Cupp and fortunately that’s very little, she comes off as an overrated bimbo.
(no offense to standard bimbos)
SE Cupp? This person’s name is C-Cup?
Please examine the face carefully. Mentally remove the glasses, and look at the jawline, the brow, and the eye sockets.
They go against convention, and decent tradition, and moral values because those are “long-held”.
In their puny minds, they are “superior” for their redefinition of everything.
That makes them wide open to Global Warming, the lie of Russian Collusion, etc. Only their superior brains and morality can reign supreme. They have created their own religion, in essence.
They have no problem tossing God aside and what He has plainly declared as Male and Female. Are there freaks of nature? Indeed, few, very few. But this is their new cause.
I even saw one Democrat describe a baby as a group of cancerous cells. They called the growing fetus as a “glioblastoma”. This is not the mind of a rational person. This is a person speaking like Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama and his father the Devil. I’m not joking when I say there is a cult following Barack.
This is the mind of a person trying to rationalize their murder of a baby. This is a person beyond help, except for an intervention by Jesus Christ.
Heh I don’t want to turn to stone!
;)
I saw some HLN commercial with her. I skipped her show like I skipped Ashley Banfield, another overrated bimbo. Banfield’s show got canceled. You should have seen the clip they were using to promote it. The Sham-Wow guy was far more credible.
Went to sleep at 2 with a 10,,
woke up st 10 with a 2...
This only makes sense.
If a tree falls in a forest, with no one nearby to hear, does it make a sound?
No. It makes a vibration.
Audible vibration, or visible radiation, is the objective reality. Hearing, or seeing, is the subjective interpretation.
No two people have absolutely identical hearing; no two people have absolutely identical seeing.
If you could go fine enough in analysis, the perception of either would be as unique as any other physical trait, like an earlobe or a fingerprint or a voiceprint.
The most obvious example of subjective variation with respect to eyesight would be color blindness.
I recall reading that long, long ago - in a book by William Green, I think.
Chuck Yeager attributed much of his success to having 20-15 eyesight: He saw them before they saw him.
It's not an analogy. It's meant to be a precise statement, but made in terms that people who are clueless about arc-seconds can comprehend. Most people can picture "a full moon" without knowing the diameter of the moon either.
That is called "Focus breathing"
That your brain fixes it doesn't surprise me at all. The left was seeing Russian collusion for 2 years that didn't exist ;)
“This is the great mystery of human vision...”
But it is, of course, no mystery to evolution, that patiently worked it out to perfection over the billions of years.
wow i never heard that before :)
Gotta be what, a song from the 50s??
Its funny, I can deal with arc-seconds, but have a hard time deciphering that sentence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.