I want you to close your eyes and think about this image I am about to describe.
“Standing on a quiet street corner under a street lamp.”
Actually do this please before reading on. Think about the image you conjure up.
If you are like me, you probably have a very clear image of someone with a suit and hat at night alone with a wet road reflecting the street lights. And if you didn’t, you might have now because I said it. Initially I said nothing about attire or time of day or rain. Whatever you came up with, hat or no hat, you have added your own extra bits in there.
Whether you have the same image as me or not is not the point. The point is that you have an image. And that image is not unlike what you would see if you were actually looking at a real scene like that, or had dreamt it last night.
My image has aspects of Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain.
Now think about this, you have your eyes shut and you are reaching for something in the dark, say the toaster on your kitchen bench to put some slices into it, as a blind person might. Close your eyes again and try it. The likelihood is that you now have an image of the layout of your kitchen top with its various appliances and where exactly the toaster is. Your sense of touch tells you if you are at the toaster or maybe near the sink or microwave. The feel, texture, sound, 3D shape, contribute to the image you have produced. Or instead, you are in the dark late at night feeling down the passageway for the door to the bathroom and the image in your head is the layout of your house and its furniture, a map.
Or think about this. You are in your living room and you hear a car noise outside in your driveway. I have no idea what image comes to mind for you, there are so many possibilities; an image of a visitor, or your partner arriving home, or something, but an image to be sure.
At one time I worked on several robots that had to see where they were going. They used ultrasound or laser light emanating out of their sensory system to bounce off objects to generate maps of their environment, indications of objects in their path. They sent something out and reacted to the received echoes.
It was one of those epiphanic moments when I read last year about the part of the brain, the neocortex, that hosts the final images from the vision system, starting with light entering your eye, affecting the light sensors in the retina, transmitted via the optic nerves, through the optic chiasma (the cross over point of left and right visual fields), the lateral geniculate bodies (the gateways working out stereo spatial information and what to focus on), to the Primary Visual Cortex for processing (which structure is very well known and understood and demonstrated in computer models), then to second and third visual cortex for more processing, and finally presented as what we consciously perceive in the cerebral cortex.
At no point does anything emit from the eye. Unlike those early robot systems.
That’s the point. When you say you are looking at something, an object or a scene, there is nothing looking out. You are not looking at it. Humphrey Bogart was not looking out of his eyes at Ingrid Bergman. What you are looking at is the replica image created in the neocortex of your brain. You are not looking out at anything. You are looking in to the internal duplicate. The image you created in the above experiments eventuate at the same cortical location as when you look at a scene with your eyes open. The “you” looking in, is some conscious (as of yet unknown) focus mechanism. As your eye moves around to focus on things, somehow it tells your internal focus mechanism to concentrate on a particular part of the duplicate internal image.
That internal duplicate in whatever form it takes is not like you looking at a movie screen though, but a much more complex interpretation of the image coming in, generated by the several stages of processing. The processing progresses, including to two main areas which determine the ventral “what” and the dorsal “where” information contained in what you are seeing. The scene objects and their characteristics, and their relative locations and motions.
The processing actually starts in the retina. For it is a fact that the retina is an actual part of your brain. It is not a peripheral nerve like your other senses. It is a bit of brain; held out away of course, exposed to the surface to do its job, in a structure that is mobile, able to rotate about to receive data from around you without moving your head too much. That mobile structure is your eyeball, and as an interesting aside its movement has one of the few instances of an anatomical pulley system. One particular muscle is in the wrong place inside your eye socket so it has its tendon over a pulley to pull the eye in the direction needed.
So the retina is a part of your brain. It actually does some early processing of the incoming information immediately. And the pre-processed image is then transferred to the next stage by necessity via a flexible cable, the optic nerve. Convenience is accomplished by converting all, I mean all, of the necessary information from the 130 million rods and cones in the retina, in a data compaction form to the one million neurons in the optic nerve. Otherwise the optic nerve would have to be 130 million nerve cells thick, not a very flexible cable.
By contrast the network connections between the primary, secondary and tertiary visual cortices do not have to be minimal, and those centres are proximal to each other, so the data compression is not necessary. In fact seems to expand as the extraction of scene analysis derives all of its information. For it is true that we end up not with a pixel array, but an object list extracted from the scene with all of their interrelationships such as distance, size, weight, colour, mobility, connectedness, function and who knows what else. The sound it makes, its smell, its history.
The fact that the input to the final cerebral cortex image, in whatever form that image takes, has nothing to do with looking out, is illustrated by the above exercises where it can be created through suggestion, sounds and touch. Vision having nothing to do with it.
It is therefore probable that the cerebral cortex image is not only nothing like the image on a movie screen, nor even an image of receptive fields, which are the data compression results coming from the first step in processing at the retina, and which is all purely optical in nature, but a multidimensional impression of the visual image and all its world knowledge associated with it.
We know this because the duplicated of the external world in the neocortex facilitates planning, anticipation, expectations, timing and such higher cognitive functions that are predicated on the existence of the internal image. It is a simulator, pure and simple. At the speed of thought, all the data allows the owner, you, to think through different choices of actions to a particular situation, and decide which one might be best.
In your image of the car noise in your driveway, you brought up world knowledge about the family cars, the whereabouts of the family members, the sound characteristics of different cars, a timeline of expected visits, maybe a smell image of pizza if you had ordered one.
That scene in your cerebral cortex is a phenomenal thing that we are nowhere near understanding or being able to duplicated. It’s more like your own private personal world simulator.
When I had my eyes closed and imgined the scene, I saw black nothingness, as per usual when I am awake and trying to imagine some scene with my eyes closed.. I never saw the movie, either. I could never imagine visually on demand. I am probably in a minority of people in the world who cannot imagine a visual scene when thinking about it. When dreaming, I do have visuals, but vague and in black and white. Some years ago I saw a scene in colour when dreaming. That’s still rare, or else I don’t remember it. Even straight after waking, I rarely remember the content of my dreams.
What I may experience when laid back relaxing with eyes closed is visual images like pages of a book, with real typed words. I find myself unable to read these pages. Maybe because I need pinhole readers or glasses to be able to read (except on a sunny day). Also, in such a relaxed waking state, I may see colour in patterns or the more usual procession of shapes which are said to be the building blocks of the universe manifesting (they move rather quickly, downwards, if I well remember) I was once in a meditative state when walking from Freo to Perth one late afternoon, into an early darkening evening. I have very occasionally had my sight-consciousness drawn into the space I am looking at before this day, like a sunset in the tropics, but this time I became briefly one with the river as I was crossing the bridge in Fremantle, looking down, and when in Perth, still walking, I had an OBE and was looking at the earth from outer space. The earth being the size of a golfball. People who don’t believe in consciousness would of course claim I was imagining it. Well, they wouldn’t know, would they? I was not imagining it. I was seeing it, like nothing I had seen before. A split second later, or so it seemed, I was back walking on the footpath along Terrace Road, just past the Family Court precinct. I was heading to the Mint. Well, opposite actually, where there were two beautiful historic homes functioning as a rooming house. These two beautiful historic homes were later demolished by Twiggy Forrest. These two building blocks are still vege gardens or some such, as far as I know.
One technical study of the human eye is “The Optics of the Human Eye”, by David A. Atchison and George Smith. Very clever people, these. Too mathematical for me, but by gum, what a marvellous part of the human body this. I study it occasionally, but study is what I, in my more hopeful Planck moments, fancy I do when dipping into such a technical work. A more easy read is “Vision For Life” by Meir Schneider. Absolutely fascinating. Of course, Bates was an early eyesight teacher and after him followed many who took up the subject. Aldous Huxley was one of them. Now, any number of people are involved, mainstream and alternative. Well. Thanks Allan. A very interesting read. Must read it once more..
Often the exceptions lead to significant insights. The topic is not my field, but an area I have great interest as a lay person. I think studying your experiences would be invaluable to a practitioner.
As for what you imagine, I tried to show that it is not just a visual scene. It is more complex, with multidimensional, or multisensory aspects to it, even more than just senses. The imagination might be sounds or feel or smell, or more intangible aspects of an imagination such as consequences, history. So nothing unusual about your experiences or the OBE. There seems to be a greater emphasis on non-visual aspects to your imaginings. Maybe due to your “pinhole” eyesight?
When I did the image experiment and saw a besuited person in a hat under the lamp, I saw it as another person with me looking on. Later when I did it again, I saw a lamp stand and clearly I was the person holding on to it. Only the street scene, no visible person in that one.
Beyond all of that, I was just pointing out that when Bogart said “Here’s looking at you kid,” he was lying. He was not looking at her, but into his imagined reconstruction, his simulation, of her and everything about her inside his brain.
As Anil Seth says in “Being You”, reality is a controlled hallucination.
Our minds “fill in” so much of what we see that what we know (prior training i.e.bias) can often distort what we perceive…a concept explored well on a couple of different levels in ‘Twelve Angry Men’, correct?
That is so true Vaidya.
In fact witness statements and lineups have come under more and more suspicion in recent times as reliable evidence in trials.
I remember an experiment some time ago when a witness when being taken to the one way window viewing room was deliberately taken past a series of pictures of one particular suspect that was to be in the lineup. The witness subsequently identified incorrectly that person as the felon, who was actually an innocent stand in for the purposes of the experiement.
I cannot recall if I saw Twelve Angry Men, but will watch it again anyway. A bit heavier than a bit of singing in the rain!
I just watched Twelve Angry Men. I had not seen it before. An A-list of 12 of the best actors at the time. Covers every human frailty. The movie definitely illustrates the different internal representations that each of us generates from the same input. That is because it is combined with totally different personal experiences as it associates everything to create that simulation of the reality outside of us. It reminds me of a different movie I saw, came out a couple years later, “Why Must I Die”, which has had a lifelong impact on me and my feelings against capital punishment, the most ugly of human actions in my book.
I don’t believe there’s “nothing looking out”. There’s a really easy experiment to prove this. (My version from a book by Rupert Sheldrake.) Go to any moderately crowded place. Airports and railway stations are good for this. Pick a random stranger at some distance away, preferably turned away from you. Look at them. Time how long it takes for them to turn around and attempt to make eye contact with you. It’s usually less than a minute.
It’s a survival instinct. We need to know when we’re being watched. If we didn’t, we’d have ended up being a predator’s dinner.
I realise this doesn’t fit with accepted scientific principles, but I can assure you, it works. Do yourself a favour and try it.
Hi Jennifer,
It is interesting that you mention this. I too have had the same experience over and over again and thought a lot about it. I’ve wondered if there is a telepathic thing going on. There is definitely nothing emitting from the eyeball, but I wondered about some other signal. Not believing in telepathy, I looked further.
Most vision research centres around the areas of focus in the vision image coming in. The areas of acuity and of conscious perception. The neocortical simulation I describe in the article. The retina covers a vaster area, and the periphery, (which a bit like what used to be considered junk DNA is now known to contain what we now call epigenetics), was ignored as insignificant. But while we focus on what we are looking at, there is a part of the optical data going via the optic nerve to another part of the brain that is not the primary visual system. Fibres go to attention centres called the superior colliculus and the pretectal nuclei. These areas are involved in reflexive eye movements and attention to visual stimuli. They are subconscious so you are not aware of that they are doing. But there is basic motion and other detection going on so that if something that deserves attention is in the peripheral vision you react to it. The obvious thing is it helps to blink and duck if something suddenly lurches towards your eyes or you bump into something you did not see with the conscious part of your vision system. (So as you say, a survival thing definitely.) When this system sees something of interest, deserving your attention, you turn towards it. In the example you give, it is working for the other person. Their attention system is aware that you are looking at them, and their attention is directed to look at you. You are not transmitting anything to them, other than you are facing them and their peripheral system notices it. I should add that your field of view is about 180 degrees, much wider than what you focus on.
And like in epigenetics, more is being discovered all the time. Just when we think you know it all, a new type of photosensitive cone has been discovered in the retina that does not project to the lateral geniculate body like the other cones, so does not go to the primary vision system at all. They are fundamental to the reflex that causes you to take notice.
It depends on the person looking and the person being looked at, I imagine. We don’t all have the same strength of projection. As an aside, there is still the “dormant” third eye. As for a sense of being watched, we know there are cameras everywhere, but one is so used to them being around, I am personally not conscious of them most of the time. However, consciousness is another aspect in this. Not a material visual projection but a finer, spiritual matter not necessarily emanating from the eye. I know, a lot of agnostics believe themselves to be atheist. Atheism doesn’t stack up when you think about it (sorry, Allan), but that is another discussion altogether. However, through quantum physics, it could be reasoned that we can connect to others by means of mental projection. Some experiments have been done in that regard.
Last night, at the Monday evening theosophical meeting, the main theme was the human aura. Said to be projected about 4 feet, give or take a foot or two, it can be seen by people with a special gifts (of imagination, Allan would say). Strangely, when I was much younger than today, I had a thick head of hair, and had no interest whatever in these things/concepts, but a few times I had felt my person and that of another, a young woman, merge with the other while a few feet apart. Nothing more happened and this merging only lasted a few seconds at most. I took it as “read” and never thought to investigate this phenomenon.
Whatever people imagine when thinking about that which they experience, but have no mental explanation for, they take the story that family, religion, culture and their intuition tells them. We in fact imbibe a lot by some kind of osmosis. Even before any religious feelings, thoughts in that regard appear, in my experience , due to the milieu one grows up in.
I am a believer in Good and evil, the universe and I am aware of an infinite variety of beliefs (and disbeliefs) about the secrets of our universal manifestation. Ideology is a need hardwired in humanity. It can be deep psychology. I think it gies back to the origin when all that came to be was One. Even now, everything is connected, projecting out into diverse and seemingly separate manifestations as a blip every Planck second. It could not be any other way.
As fot beliefs. There are people who turned from Atheist to Believer in an instant by some inner experience. By the same token, staunch believers have turned atheist, if not perhaps all at once. There is more in the universe than we can poke a stick at, let alone get to understand the exact workings, the facts and the truth of, but it is in our nature to be seekers and better understanders.
Jacob, usually I like to reply quickly to comments, as courtesy but also because they generate ideas to go back with. Your last comment has a lot to think about in it and I will come back eventually.
Your comment was in reply to what Jennifer had written, but to me it is interesting that this post has stirred comments across the spectrum from science to mystical to spiritual.
My post was about my reaction to realising that a complete internal world model is somehow generated in the neocortex and it is that simulation that we “scan” with some as of yet unknown conscious focus mechanism. Jennifer introduced alternative observations about something else maybe happening, which she perhaps wisely and safely did not try to explain. My reply introduced paranormal concepts such as telepathy. And Jacob has extended that to suggest not only paranormal, auras for instance, but spiritual or religious “meeting” of minds or even “merging” of bodies.
Until these are disproven scientifically, I have no problem with them as ideas, and similarly until they are proven scientifically I have no belief in them. Definitely no need for apologies Jacob.
I am one of those who cannot help but be scientific in all things. By definition, supernatural is outside the scope of science, so that becomes a personal thing for individuals. There is no meeting point for convincing each other. My sister Sally went from atheist (I think) to fanatical believer after she had an epiphany, a visit from God that she swore by. Darwin went from orthodox believer to at least agnostic when he could not match the Bible’s Old Testament to his observations during the voyage on the Beagle, to probably atheist on the death of his nine year old daughter Annie. That will do it. The discussion on beliefs around good and evil is for another time.
Thanks for sharing this inspiring and thought-provoking post. While I fully agree with your smart conclusions, I feel obliged to complement it with the statement, that this internal representation is a rather precise (in the sense of “compatible with the received information content”) representation of the objective reality that is shared by others. Of course mixed with subjective elements. There are dangerous postmodern philosophical directions that deny the objectivity of our perception.
Anybody who has doubts about the objectivity of our sensory processing may imagine driving with 140 km/h on a motorway and assuming that the internal representation of the others around him is different from his own….
Jan Koenderink, a pioneer of computer vision, began his speech at MIT in 1990 (which I had the priviledge to attend) like this: If Immanuel Kant was right, that our perception is in space and time, our brain must necessesarily have an internal representation of space and time. From there he turned to differential geometry and local operators.
Thank you for your kind comments. At least that’s how I perceive them. How I want to perceive them. Maybe I am inserting my own interpretation on what I read, and adjusted it to suit my world of experience. Maybe you meant something else. Maybe someone else with a different history than mine, which is everyone else of course, sees what you wrote differently.
Joking of course, but I also despair at the implications and consequences of misinterpretation. The example in a previous comment about false line up identification of suspects of a crime addressed that. Leading to in the worst case, innocent executions. And it is the theme of that movie “Twelve Angry Men” that Vaidya suggested.
It’s 35 years since the Koenderink MIT speech you were lucky enough to attend, and we know definitely that we have internal perceptions of space and time now. My personal vision hero was David Marr, also MIT, who died very young a decade earlier, and I named some of my robot vision components in honour after his work, “Primal Sketch” for instance.
Hi Allan,
Article was very fun and interesting!
I visualize most everything but appreciate that not everyone does.
Also was reminded of a Richard Dawkins quote regarding simulation but he seems a little out of sorts these days so won’t include that here.
Thanks,
Cheryl
Hi Cheryl,
I’m glad you liked it. I did not realise that not everyone visualises. Or at least not all the same way. Jacob described his absence of imagining in his first comment. That has been insightful.
There is much more to this, but it is too technical for this blog, and leads to exciting possibilities for AI, consciousness, robotics and whatnot. “Whatnot” being a highly scientific term used a lot in Australia!
One of my favourite books is Dawkins’ 1976 “The Selfish Gene”, where the quote you mention about simulation first appeared: “Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster. The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have cumulated in subjective consciousness.” Far from being out of sorts, perhaps it is the last sentence that seems to have anticipated what we are discovering now about that internal neocortical simulation.
In the same book he goes on to say, “Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.” A bit like the under the lamp post image. Sometimes I am in the image when i do it and not other times. Sometimes it is Gene Kelly!
Thanks for your comment. I’ve been surprised, pleasantly, about the wide variety of comments coming back.
Cheers,
Allan
“There is nothing new under the sun”. Guessing; there is nothing new in the universe. It has been suggested, by me at some stage in my journey, and no doubt by others before me, that the internet is a simulation of the Indranet (Indra’s Net*). Generally, whatever we invent is (maybe) a simulation of the real thing and whatever we do or experience is a repeat happening on a continuous loop. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, for instance. The concept itself was not new in Nietzsche’s time. He either found it in the Eastern philosophy he had recourse to or intuited it (through the Indranet-the real internet). The internet can then be seen as a simulation of the real thing. Back to the brain. Would it be anything like what it is without a heart? Personally, I don’t think so. The eyes are said to be the window to the soul. That must be via the heart, surely.
* Indra’s Net is an Eastern philosophical term for the entire universe as one whole connected being. Telepathy, through the Void, follows as a necessary consequence of the interconnectedness.
Once again you have given food for thought.
The continuous loop thing? Are we talking “Groundhog Day” or “not learning from the past”?
Starting with the Big Bang, when there was an instance of massive energy expanding to what is there today, there is that connection from the common beginnings, but the connections would have evaporated as the universe grew and aged, else remaining together in some orderly fashion would defy the law of entropy I think; the second law of thermodynamics. So I cannot see the entire universe as one whole connected thing, Indra or no Indra.
We are indeed learning from the past, but very slowly, so it must be a spiral, rather than a useless loop* (*name of a locality in W.A.). Remarkable, Allan, that you cannot see the universe as one living breathing unit. This, I think, is elementary, Watson. Elementary cosmology? Gravity reaches everywhere as one, so we are told by scientists. Light! There you are! We are also connected through light. We can see the stars. Actually, I am convinced we are also connected through the Void, No time-space there. Instant action at a distance through entanglement. We are all entangled, since the Big Bang. Fancy that! Cosmodynamics?
I like the Watson reference! But I am more interested in “what’s-on” for dinner.
It’s not called the UNI verse for nothing. It’s all One. So, all of it is still connected. I have been totally mystified by Allan claiming that the connections would have evaporated. I think Allan would like to re-visit that (his) notion as it is totally unsustainable baloney.
But what about the premise of the post Jacob?
That when we “look” at something, what out brain is looking at is not out there, but at an inner representation of what our senses have detected. The eye moving around is simply telling our brain where to focus on that internal version.
Like the image on a screen in a control room moves around as the security camera moves around outside.
The premise of your post, Allan, is in its interpretation technically correct, as far as my brain can get its interpretation on that post’s premise done. My premise on the connectivity of everything, in the universe (not to be confused with the theory of everything) which you claim without foundation has evaporated since the big bang , rests on my (brain’s) interpretation of what I know about the entire spectrum of radiation, about the Void as a mediator and about the quantum phenomena as observed by the eyes of physicists and interpreted by their brains and subsequently made public, and, naturally, my own intuition and reasoning. Admittedly, all the scientific observations are mediated by machines, such as we use to communicate (but more clever), and of course the parts of the universal wave spectrum our eyes cannot see and our brains may then interpret directly or through receptors (pineal gland?) the ways and means science has not as yet demonstrated with their clever machines. You would admit, surely, that the technical aspects of your post rely entirely on what science has been able to deduce sofar with clever machines and intelligent interpretations.
Yes, my premise relies on the technical aspects from the use of clever machines. I agree with you that they are pretty clever. Like most good scientists, I do not profess that we know everything yet and accept that what is known may be altered with new evidence. So what I talk about in the post is what is known so far. Without those clever machines mind you we would all still be in Aristotle’s world of conjecture. And we would not have other clever machines like phones and computers, cars and planes, toasters and microwaves.
If you take a block of ice say, with all the molecules packed together, so all connected, and heat it up and give it infinite space to expand, the particles separate and are no longer connected as far as I can discern. No information exchange. That’s my thought on the connectedness of the universe evaporating after the big bang.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oW-846Kwm6Q
AI has a critical look at the math of quantum physics and related problems. Turtles all the way and an infinite money supply for “science” awaits.
My view: Manifestation is a dance of opposites through quantum pulsing in a brave new Void.
The video is less than 3 hours, but it feels eternal.