What Your Brain "Sees" Part 2

It’s no surprise that your brain’s visual system constantly processes rapidly changing stimuli in everyday life. For rapidly changing environments it appears that the brain focuses complete images (e.g., rapid sequences showed an ongoing representation of current input). What is new is the verification from research done by Dr. Dirk Jancke of the Institute for Neural Computation at Ruhr University. His studies demonstrated that for slower image sequences “the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences.” For slower image sequences, the brain apparently does no longer reports complete images of actual features but represents their relative difference in time, a process that is evidently similar to methods used for video data compression in communication technology.  Now I have a better understanding of the reason I “see” more in a given environment when I just take a few moments to chill and allow my brain to absorb the information. Fun! Kurzweil published an interesting commentary on this research.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-brains-visual-data-compression-algorithm?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e20d030137-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_147a5a48c1-e20d030137-281999441