The Neuroscience of Illusions and Dictionaries

Scientific American is running a pair of stories about what words and illusions can tell us about the brain. Mark Changizi of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is interviewed about his research into the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the evolution of language. The second article contains a slide-show of various illusions and why the brain interprets them as it does.

Comments

Link to the meat

[SheeEttin]

Link to the one-page/print version of the dictionary article and the meat of the illusion article
Also, a summary of the illusion article: The brain uses context, rather than absolute sampling.

Binocular vision and elephants

[Red Flayer]

For the evolution of forward-facing eyes, I am arguing that it is for a kind of x-ray vision. It actually allows us to see through stuff--like when you hold up a finger vertically and you see through it instead of beyond it. For animals that are large and living in forested environments, there should be selection pressure for forward-facing eyes, because you can actually see more of your environment.

That makes a lot of sense, and is very interesting to me since I recall learning that predators have forward facing eyes so they can better detect movement of prey (binocular vision) while prey animals have outward facing eyes so they can better be aware of threats (greater field of vision).

I had always wondered why elephants had forward-facing eyes, since they are not predators... and this helps explain it. I had always supposed that it was because they were social animals, and communication ability and multiple individuals scanning for threats was better than one individual with a larger field of view. This makes even more sense if the scanning in a smaller area is more effective due to the binocular vision associated with forward-facing eyes.

Re:So can somebody explain?

[Dachannien]

The LEDs aren't actually illuminated all the time. They are actually flashing very fast - faster than your brain can discern. When you eat crunchy foods, it vibrates your head (and therefore, your retinas) at a frequency sufficient to allow some of the LED flashes to appear above or below the other flashes.

Rods and cones

[Dachannien]

In the first FA, Changizi states his hypothesis that primates evolved color vision in order to detect changes in emotional state indicated by things like blushing/flushing of the face. I find this a bit problematic, primarily because it doesn't explain why our vision evolved to respond to three different wavelength ranges of light (red, green, and blue). It would make more sense to have only evolved cones responsive to red light, or perhaps red and one other color, if that were the only reason.

It seems to me that a more reasonable hypothesis is that trichromatic color vision co-evolved along with the colorings of fruits that primates would find nutritious. Emotional cues seem like a more subtle issue - as well as a mostly-solved problem - that would have taken advantage of color vision that was already partially or fully evolved.

More/Better Optical Illusions

[martyb]

The second article contains a slide-show of various illusions [CC] [GC] and why the brain interprets them as it does.

Maybe I missed something, but I found the second article to be a let-down.

(Warning for epileptics: if visual stimuli can set off a seizure for you, you should probably stay away from the following links. I am not susceptible, but I found the second link to be visually overwhelming at first.)

IMHO, more interesting galleries of examples can be found at Wikipedia's Optical Illusions page and at Michael Bach's 78 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena page.

Re:So can somebody explain?

[Eighty7]

Hang on, do you weigh less than a duck.

Serious conceptual flaws

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Quoting from the slide show link:

It's a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.

The whole philosophy of perception that this quote embodies is fundamentally wrong. As an example of this, take a look at the first so-called "illusion" in the slideshow: the Edward Adelson checkerboard-and-shadon example. This is called an "illusion" on the basis that our eyesight "misleads us" by telling us that a light square in the shadow is lighter than a dark one in the light, whereas they are, supposedly, "the same color." By "the same color," what they seem to mean is that the stimulus, i.e., the rays of light reflected or emitted from the squares that hit our retina, have the same spectrum and intensity.

What they're missing is that the point of vision, and perception in general, isn't to give us information about the rays of light that hit the retina. What vision does is give us information about the objects in our environment, which reflect or emit rays of light. The reason we see the two squares as having different colors, despite the fact that our retinas are getting the exact same pointwise stimulus from them, is because the visual system, using contextual information about light and shadow across the whole scene, can figure out that the surface spectral reflectivity of the two squares must be different. Square B looks lighter than square A because the visual system judges, correctly, that it must reflect more light. Or put alternatively: the visual system figures out that if the two squares were in the same light, the point stimulus from the reflected light rays would be different.

This is accurately reproducing an aspect of the physical reality of the outside world; vision is accurately reproducing the spectral reflectivity of surfaces in our environment, at the apparent expense of failing to reproduce the spectral distribution of the rays of light that hit our retina. But of course, the answer to that one is that the rays of light aren't the object of visual perception, they're just the means.

Seeing the squares as different colors is not an illusion. There is only one visual illusion in that example, and they don't remark on it: the illusion of seeing, in a flat surface, a 3D scene with light and shadow. The judgement that the two squares have different colors follows from that, because in the real-world scene the image depicts, those squares would in fact be surfaces with different colors when seen under the same light.

This is why...

[jd]

...strong AI cannot come from the processing of real data. That is not how minds work. Minds exist in a self-contained virtual reality that are periodically updated with real-world sensory data. This is why autism can impact the flow of that data and its connectedness without impacting the underlying mind. They're simply not associated in that way.