3/29/2008

Vision & Perception



"In a 2001 study published by Nature, Frank S. Werblin, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and doctoral student Boton Roska, M.D., showed that the optic nerve carries ten to twelve output channels, each of which carries only minimal information about a given scene.”

“Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from the cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels."

-The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil pp.186