David Hubel Has an Interesting Perspective on How Our Brains

question 43

Essay

David Hubel has an interesting perspective on how our brains reconstruct visual scenes:
Many people, including myself, still have trouble accepting the idea that the interior of a form … does not itself excite cells in our brain … that our awareness of the interior as black or white … depends only on cells' sensitivity to the borders. The intellectual argument is that perception of an evenly lit interior depends on the activation of cells having fields at the borders and on the absence of activation of cells whose fields are within the borders, since such activation would indicate that the interior is not evenly lit. So our perception of the interior as black, white, gray or green has nothing to do with cells whose fields are in the interior-hard as that may be to swallow … What happens at the borders is the only information you need to know: the interior is boring.
That is, the borders of objects contain the important information and the interior is not critical for visual perception. Based on our understanding of how the retina and cortex process visual information, why do you think the borders of objects are the most important to perception??

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