How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality.
How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality.
Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world? What is special about the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, and what does that have to do with the way that you explore and come to understand the world? Are there new theories of how the brain operates? And in what ways is it doing something very different than current AI? Join Eagleman with guest Jeff Hawkins, theoretician and author of "A Thousand Brains" to dive into Hawkins' theory of many models running in the brain at once.
One thing I find very interesting about how brains process reality is that there's a disease that makes your eyes have blind spots. However people with that disease don't see those blind spots because the brain fills the gaps with the information it knows to be there. So you could see a door closed just as it was when you last looked at it directly, but in the meantime someone opened the door and you're still seeing the door closed until you look at it directly.
We all have blind spots because there's a hole in the retina in the back of the eye for the optical nerve. The spots are located on the outer top side of our field of view and you can become aware of them with some visual tests online.
Another fun thing you can do is look at the sky (not the sun!) on a sunny day and start seeing your blood circulation and blind spot.
I find myself often wondering what colors look like to other people because there is no way to know for sure that what I see as red looks the same to everyone else. It's just a frequency of light. How the brain interprets that is anybody's guess. I can't describe the difference of red vs blue and I've never met anyone else who could either. Maybe what I see as red is actually what I see as blue to someone else.
Apart from the philosophical aspect which is unanswerable, I feel certain we see equivalent colors. This is an interesting article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space Scientists found what the three primary colors our eyes see are. Because of the overlap in cone activation they're actually imaginary colors that don't exist.
I can't describe the difference of red vs blue and I've never met anyone else who could either.
In the Mask movie there is a great scene where he demonstrates colors to his blind girlfriend. They did a really great job with it.
I'm red-green colourblind(Deuteranopia) and often think this exact thing, how the reality I perceive is different from others purely due to this.
I, too, think about this all the time.
... Asked the brain about itself. Typical narcissistic brain behavior, don't see the other organs doing it.
If all else fails, a kick in the nuts is a reality check
My bowels have been questioning a lot lately, so it’s not entirely without precedent.
Yea, what about your liver? Have you asked how it feels today?
The liver got the toughest job out there. He got no time for himself. Poor liver.
I don't think it's the brain but rather our consciousness that is limited. Our sensory inputs are always on and processed by the brain, but our consciousness is very picky and also slow.
People can sometimes recall true memories that they weren't aware of, or react to things they didn't think of and such.
Consciousness is also somehow lagging behind the actual decision making, but always presents itself as the cause of action.
Sort of like Windows telling you that you removed a USB stick 2 seconds after you did it and was well aware of it happening. Consciousness is like that, except it takes responsibility for it too..
When it encounters something that it didn't predict, it'll tell you that "yeah this happened and this is why you did that". Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.
This is a good thing mostly, because it allows you to react faster than having to consider your options consciousnessly. You do not need to or have time to make a conscious decision to dodge a dodgeball, but you'll still think you did.
This isn't really what OP is talking about.
We really can't see very well at all outside of the centre of our focus. this paper says 6 degrees, I heard this as a coin held at arms length.
Our minds "render" most of the rest of what we think we see.
You're right that we discard most of our sensory inputs, but with visual inputs there's much less data than it appears.
When it encounters something that it didn’t predict, it’ll tell you that “yeah this happened and this is why you did that”. Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.
There are interesting stories about tests done with split-brain patients, where the bridge connecting the left and right brain hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is severed. There are then ways to provide information to one hemisphere, have that hemisphere initiate an action, and then ask the other hemisphere why it did that. It will immediately make up a lie, even though we know that’s not the actual reason. Other than being consciouss, we’re not that different from ChatGPT. If the brain doesn’t know why something happened, it’ll make up a convincing explanation.
NAILED IT! Yeah, our subconscious is driving and only sends an executive summary up top. And we think, "I did this!" Nah. You didn't. You are just along for the ride.
People hate this notion because it negates free will. Well, yeah, it kinda does.
Everybody reading these comments and considering the implications needs to go read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a first contact story set in the near-ish future, and really goes into consciousness and intelligence. Very thought provoking if you thought this comment chain was interesting.
That assumes "you" are just the conscious part. If you accept the rest of your brain (and body) as part of "you", then it's a less dramatic divide.
You can train your subconscious! Well, at least influence it's decisions. Videogames are a great example. Trained reaction/response. Repeated response to similar stimulus can create a trained subconscious response.
However, I have difficulty, especially now that I'm older, where subconscious and conscious will compete and I will lose acuity of what I actually did.
That and my memory is getting worse. :/
Basically, yes. Our eyes capture the light that goes into them at 24 frames per second (please correct me if I goofed on that) and the image is upside down.
Our brains turn those images upright, and it also fills in the blanks. The brain basically guesses what's going on between the frames. It's highly adapt at pattern recognition and estimation.
My favorite example of this is our nose. Look at you nose. You can look down and see it a little, and you can close one eye and see more of it. It's right there in the bottom center of our view, but you don't see it at all everyday.
That's because it's always there, and your brain filters it out. The pattern of our nose being there doesn't change, so your brain just ignores it unless you want to intentionally see it. You can extrapolate that to everything else. Most things the brain expects to see, and does see through our eyes, is kind of ignored. It's there, but it's not as important as say, anything that's moving.
Also, and this is fun to think about, we don't even see everything. The color spectrum is far wider than what our eyes can recognize. There are animals, sea life and insects that can see much much more than we can.
But to answer more directly, you are right, the brain does crazy heavy lifting for all of our senses, not just sight. Our reality is confined to what our bodies can decifer from the world through our five senses.
If you want a fun experiment of all the things we see but don’t actually process, I recommend the game series I’m On Observation Duty. You flip through a series of security cameras and identify when something changed. It’s incredible when you realize the entire floor of a room changed or a giant thing went missing, and you just tuned it out because your brain never felt a need to take in that detail.
It’s sorta horror genre and I hate pretty much every other horror thing, but I love those games because they make me think about how I think.
That sounds pretty interesting. Thanks
the 24 fps thing is one hella myth. our cones and rods send a continuous stream of information, which is blended with past-received information in our perception to remove stuff like the movement from darting your eyes around.
We definitely are seeing things faster than 24 Hz, or we wouldn't be able to tell a difference in refresh rates above that.
Edit: I don't think we have a digital, on-off refresh rate of our vision, so fps doesn't exactly apply. Our brain does turn the ongoing stream of sensory data from our eyes into our vision "video", but compared to digital screen refresh rates, we can definitely tell a difference between 24 and say 60 fps.
Yeah it's not like frames from a projector. It's a stream. But the brain skips parts that haven't changed.
Also, your eyes dart around and you only see a little patch. You blink. Your brain makes up a nice stable image of the world, mostly consisting of things that your brain think should be there.
The 24fps thing aounds wrong. That's not even a cinematic 30.
I mean all animals have brains to render reality, aka visual, audio, predator awareness. It's not so special, most animals have tiny little brains.
Some animals, such as certain deep water crustaceans (Matis Shrimp) and cephalopods (Cuttlefish) can see more colors than most mammals, and their brains are often smaller.
Your brain is constantly processing the inputs from all of your senses and pretty much ignoring them if they fit with what it is already expecting.
Your brain is lazy. If everything seems to fit with what your brain expects then you believe that what you are seing is reality and you generally ignore it.
Generally the mind only focuses on what it believes is salient/interesting/unexpected.
Imagine if we had image sensors that could filter like that. Boom, video 100 times smaller in size. "Autonomous" surveillance cameras running on fractions of the power. Etc. Etc. Just far more efficient.
I heard a similar thing. But a bit more complicated. It wouldn't be just the eyes, but all senses used by the brain to edit a filtered vision of reality.
And while the eyes take in everything they're capable of, the brain only focuses on what it considers important. Which is probably false due to the many, many times one will search for something within their cone of vision, yet are unable to see it.
So while I'm not sure of the details, the brain can be thought of as choosy with what it shows.
How do our brains process reality? Like this.
This one got me.
You can stop time by looking at a clock hand briefly. It’s your brain filling in blanks.
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-do-clock-hands-seem-to-slow-down/
And in the end "reality" is just excitations in quantum fields. And you "perceive" mostly electromagnetic forces.
The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).