“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?” (2018)

So my visual system takes an image and projects it back through time to when I started moving my eyes to present a consistent image of the world? Or, alternatively, I have to be perceiving the past as time travel is impossible, I am living in the past and my visual system can fill in the holes and make it seem like I'm always perceiving the present. Why this is presented as bullshit insane I have no idea. It seems…

I have a (thankfully mild) inherited retina disorder. If you read the part about lasers and eye damage it’s basically that, but the “lasers” are faulty genes rather than anything external causing the eye damage. And I can verify that at first my brain did an incredibly good job at error-correcting over it, but in the last couple years it’s finally been able to “peek through”. One day I was hiking and suddenly had black spots in my vision. Then…

It's amazing how many of the "bullshit insane" things in neuroscience make perfect damn sense from a Bayesian brain standpoint. If you're saccading to update an approximate posterior model of the visual scene, you don't need to "pause" or "blank out" the blur of the saccade. Each fixation is a sampling of the environment under generative assumptions, so yeah, your previous posterior becomes your new prior, and as long as the saccades don't take too long, your new prior is…

Very entertaining. It would be so incredible to figure out how the brain does this. Or the age-old fantasy of being able to see with someone else's vision. The problem here being that you would have to see with their whole brain for it to make a difference, haha. And how babies for example might perceive the world, as they do not have that much data to fill in the gaps with yet. Fascinating.