Your brain tells your eyes what to look for
You have ten times more neurons going from your visual cortex to your eyes than you have going from your eyes to your cortex. That means you make sense of the world by scanning for the information you need, not by taking in everything and trying to sort it out. Don’t bother being “against” this strategy because your brain is built this way. Your visual cortex sends templates to your eyes to help them zoom in on what’s important, because your brain could not possibly process the chaos of raw detail. This seemingly reverse flow of information is profound evidence that past experience automatically shapes our understanding of the present.
- Loretta Graziano Breuning
Related
Jeff Lieberman’s Evolution And Future Of Consciousness
…only are we not able to observe outside our small window of perception (unless we use technology), our brain is actually “creating a lie” to operate with. The brain constructs patterns. Lieberman shows some examples, such as a visual illusion and how viewing a symbol in slow motion shows the waves which we can’t see with normal vision.
Lieberman didn’t mention this, but he gets into some subjects I’m very interested in, such as affordability and perception as an interface. I am also reminded of the excellent book Visual Intelligence by Donald D. Hoffman, which describes the rules our vision systems use to construct reality. And, as Hoffman himself suggests in that book (and expounds in his paper “The Interface Theory of Perception”), the construction of reality may not actually be a reconstruction. The phenomenal sense of something need not resemble the relational sense. Our perception builds fictions that are useful for the organism to survive.
Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (book)
The Interface Theory of Perception
(Source: psychologytoday.com)
