A Mathematical Model Unlocks the Secrets of Vision
Mathematicians and neuroscientists have created the first anatomically accurate model that explains how vision is possible
Information from the eye passes through a bottleneck before it gets to the brain’s visual cortex, which heavily processes the sparse signal.
This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the brain’s 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 you’re actually making up,” said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. “You don’t actually see them.”
Yet the brain must be doing a pretty good job of inventing the visual world, since we don’t routinely bump into doors. Unfortunately, studying anatomy alone doesn’t reveal how the brain makes these images up any more than staring at a car engine would allow you to decipher the laws of thermodynamics.
Read here
Mathematicians and neuroscientists have created the first anatomically accurate model that explains how vision is possible
Information from the eye passes through a bottleneck before it gets to the brain’s visual cortex, which heavily processes the sparse signal.
This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the brain’s 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 you’re actually making up,” said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. “You don’t actually see them.”
Yet the brain must be doing a pretty good job of inventing the visual world, since we don’t routinely bump into doors. Unfortunately, studying anatomy alone doesn’t reveal how the brain makes these images up any more than staring at a car engine would allow you to decipher the laws of thermodynamics.
Read here