Hack 13. Understand Visual Processing

The visual system is a complex network of modules and pathways, all specializing in different tasks to contribute to our eventual impression of the world.

When we talk about "visual processing," the natural mode of thinking is of a fairly self-contained process. In this model, the eye would be like a video camera, capturing a sequence of photographs of whatever the head happens to be looking at at the time and sending these to the brain to be processed. After "processing" (whatever that might be), the brain would add the photographs to the rest of the intelligence it has gathered about the world around it and decide where to turn the head next. And so the routine would begin again. If the brain were a computer, this neat encapsulation would be how the visual subsystem would probably work.

With that (admittedly, straw man) example in mind, we'll take a tour of vision that shows just how nonsequential it all really is.

And one need go no further than the very idea of the eyes as passive receptors of photograph-like images to find the first fault in the straw man. Vision starts with the entire body: we walk around, and move our eyes and head, to capture depth information [Hack #22] like parallax and more. Some of these decisions about how to move are made early in visual processing, often before any object recognition or conscious understanding has come into play.

This pattern of vision as an interactive process, including many feedback loops before processing has reached conscious perception, is a common one. It's true there's a progression from raw to processed visual signal, but it's a mixed-up, messy kind of progression. Processing takes time, and there's a definite incentive for the brain to make use of information as soon as it's been extracted; there's no time to wait for processing to "complete" before using the extracted information. All it takes is a rapidly growing dark patch in our visual field to make us flinch involuntarily [Hack #32], as if something were looming over us. That's an example of an effect that occurs early in visual processing.

But let's look not at the mechanisms of the early visual system, but how it's used. What are the endpoints of all this processing? By the time perception reaches consciousness, another world has been layered on top of it. Instead of seeing colors, shapes, and changes over time (all that's really available to the eyes), we see whole objects. We see depth, and we have a sense of when things are moving. Some objects seem to stand out as we pay attention to them, and others recede into the background. Consciously, we see both the world and assembled result of the processing the brain has performed, in order to work around constraints (such as the eyes' blind spot [Hack #16] ), and to give us a head start in reacting with best-guess assumptions. The hacks in this chapter run the whole production line of visual processing, using visual illusions and anomalies to point out some detail of how vision works.

But before diving straight into all that, it's useful to have an overview of what's actually meant by the visual system. We'll start at the eye, see how signals from there go almost directly to the primary visual cortex on the back of the brain, and from there are distributed in two major streams. After that, visual information distributes and merges with the general functions of the cortex itself.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 759