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Human Brain seems to procceses image data serially
Tekmage writes "Ever wonder how the brain processes image/vision data? According to this research, it does so in a more serial manner than parallel. " This has been one of those on-going debates since the 1960s, with the advent of machine vision, with this being the latest round in the battle between the two sides.
People have known for years that some visual processes occur in parallel, because they take constant time regardless of the amount of input. For example, if I ask you to pick one red square out of a scattering of many green squares, the time required does not depend on the number of squares. Other tasks require times proportional to the number of objects. For example, finding one red square in a scattering of red circles, green circles, and green squares, is a task requiring time proportional to the number of items you have to sort through. Everybody assumes that this is a serial process. All this has been known for years-- the description of the tasks that can be done in parallel, and hence the properties of the hardware that computes them, was pretty much settled in the late '80s.
No doubt the research reported in this article is important for some reason, because I saw the technical paper it was based on in the most recent issue of Nature, which is a pretty major journal. Unfortunately I don't have it with me, so I can't read the paper and tell you why it is important. Certainly it's not just the fact that some kinds of visual perception are serial.
I start breakfast, and then take a shower while the water boils or whatnot. While taking a shower, I often think of what I'm going to code after breakfast. I would consider that to be "multi-tasking".
Now, here's another thing - how many times do you wake up in the morning with an answer to a complex coding problem? For me - it's *alot*. I find the answers just float in from dimension X into my head. That's parallel processing - part of my brain solved the problem while the other part handled something completely different without either part being aware of what the other was doing.
I think the debate is rather moot - we can do both. If you want to argue over the sematics, you can do so. But when I think of the brain, I think of it as a complex signals processor.
What I mean is, when you see something, it's translated into a signal, which is run through a series of filters and comparisons to tell you what you're seeing. This is also why you don't have an exact copy of what you saw - your brain only stores the "most significant bits" necessary to duplicate the signal. Some brains are better than others about reconstructing the signal. If you don't have all of the signal, your brain fudges it with values from similar experiences (or your values/beliefs). And if you have no signal at all, you post as an Anonymous Coward.
So my point is - it can be both. Infact, look at how society is structured - into clusters of people (brains?) that work in parallel on a project until completion (teamwork). Minimal communication. Why wouldn't your own brain be wired in a similar fashion - with dozens, if not hundreds, of semi-autonomous agents working towards the same goal?
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We humans have developed organizational intelligence. Groups of human brains, hooked up with the appropriate networking, can themselves become an alien intelligence, as different from human intelligence as human behavior is from cellular behavior.
For a long time, this has been mostly the province of corporations and governments. Ever wonder why such entities often lack common sense? It's because they are made up of humans, but aren't human. Congress is a group of over 400 humans; it doesn't act as a human, but can be modeled as an intelligent, alien being.
Today, we have the Internet. On a smaller scale, we have Slashdot-style phenomena. These are virtually those "Beowulf clusters of human brains". It is just another alien intelligence.
The big difference between the Internet and government/corporate organizations is in the interhuman connectivity. In governments and corporations, the governing layers are codified into a bureaucracy. This causes specific people to act as chokepoints, and that in turn limits the number of people that can interact effectively. On the Internet, the governing layers are a lot less codified. This requires a lot more data filtering at the various nodes (humans)--spam and similar phenomena travel better across the Internet than through your office--and a lot more bandwidth. But the Internet is all about bandwidth.
Bureaucracies are alien intelligences made of humans. Internet communities are alien intelligences made of humans. They are different species of alien, and they are fighting each other.
Why are bureaucracies afraid of internet communities, and vice versa? The answer is easy to see if you stop thinking in terms of humans. The bureaucracies are seeing a brand new type of intelligence. The "Linux community" is a perfect example. Over the course of eight years, this thing has gotten Microsoft, one of the Lords of Bureaucracy, frightened. A race war of organizational intelligences is brewing, if not already being fought.
Is this the end of humanity and the beginning of organizational intelligence? Hardly. We have been living with bureaucracies since the Pharoahs, possibly before. But just the knowledge that there are inhuman intelligences out there helps you to better understand them, and to better interact with them.
--The basis of all love is respect
I seem to remember from long ago that the switching time for neurons is the same as that for mechanical relays .. on the order of milliseconds. Such low switching time makes it impossible for vision to be operating in anything other than a massively parallel manner.
Given this, the article will have to do better than just state `vision is serial' w/o specifying how that is possible when using slow neurons.
Joe