Your mind's '.brain' jpeg-like picture file format probed Top boffins say they have gained insights into one of the most amazing capabilities of the human brain – its ability to store and recognise visual images. They say that the noggin compresses pictures in a process roughly as efficient in terms of storage space as turning photos into jpegs – but one much superior for the purpose …
Well, back in the days I've always been amazed how some of my fellow students were able to compress data. No matter how much learning material they stuffed their brains with it all was packed to the entropy of ale. Mind you, it was mostly a one-way function except on those nasty occasions of one pint too many...
"Well, back in the days I've always been amazed how some of my fellow students were able to compress data."
Yes, but it's mostly stored in the SODIMM area of the cortex. After each exam, a pulse to 0v on the /RST line clears the way for the next exam's data. Hence, only enough storage for one paper is ever needed. <g>
...was covered in the book "A Model of the Brain" by John Zachary Young, 1964, and alluded to by me in previous posts.
CNET, April 7, 2010 11:01 AM PDT: "...The human eye and optic nerve pre-process visual information into triangleness, circleness, and other geometric shapes. The serifs on letters increase the amount of information sent to the brain, and thus increase speed and (probably) comprehension."
TheRegister, Posted Thursday 5th August 2010 13:22 GMT: "The Human Eye does not send a bitmap to the brain. The three bitmaps generated by the rods (Y) and two types of cones (I and Q) are enhanced and correlated beginning at the sensors themselves, and further decoded along the optic nerve into values like "circleness" "squareness" "nearness" even "faceness" before they reach the visual areas. Just the kind of information needed to solve folding problems.
Because these analyses are so very compute intense when attempted with linear processing, the slow (~44Hz) but massively parallel human eye/brain has a speed advantage.
It is interesting to note the similarities in the human hearing system, transcoding sound from the pressure domain and transmitting a frequency analysis to the brain."
It makes sense that the memory of images follows these same transformations
On a side note, when you make a .jpg file of random data, for example a cloud of pollin, the compression logic encodes non existant eyeballs, faces, and other organic forms into the image.
...the whole idea of image compression was to get rid of data that the brain was less likely to process, meaning non-eyes-non-faces, etc.
So .brain and .jpg files ARE similar. Here is one of the pollin pictures: http://nvmedicalpot.com/growlog/Day-66-pollin-002.jpg
You have a very good point, frank, it would be very interesting to take pictures of random (actually chaotic) events like this in a bitmap format, then render in JPEG and compare.
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Starting reading the report but then got to:
"We recorded from visual area V4 in awake fixating monkeys "
At that point I got scared / confused / sicknened and stopped reading. Still it looks interesting.
I'll watch a review of this on Horizon some day when they can at least try to keep my interest with interesting camera angles, emotive soundtrack and a voice over by husky sounding lady with a BBC accent without the mention of monkeys....
Yes Pahhh, much of this kind of research is done on living animal subjects – mostly monkeys and cats, due to physiological similarities to humans – and they often involve painful, crippling interventions, which no rare lead to the subject's death.
If you want to get really scared, look into how it was determined that neurons in the visual cortex mirror the retina's log-polar mapping. It's one gory tale of forced eye fixation, brain injections and posthumous tissue extraction – repeated multiple times, of course, since in science you cannot rely on one-time data.
Nice dreams! ^_~
"But such .brain pictures, stripped of much of the information on flat bits, are still good for subsequent recognition of objects, faces etc."
“Psychological experiments have shown that subjects can still recognize line drawings of objects when flat edges are erased. But erasing angles and other regions of high curvature makes recognition difficult,” says Connor.
Of course they can still recognise them, if you remove the straight edges the .brain compressed form remains roughly the same. The fact that a human finds it easy to recognise a compressed image is not a fair test of whether the compression format is good for subsequent recognition in general, for instance, by a computer that isn't using .brain.
“Psychological experiments have shown that subjects can still recognize line drawings of objects when flat edges are erased. But erasing angles and other regions of high curvature makes recognition difficult,” says Connor
So there is a scientific basis for childrens dot-to-dot pictures!
If you look at one (uncompleted) that has lots of curved lines broken up into dots, you can't easily tell what the picture is of. Much easier if the picture consists of straight lines broken up into dots.
Can you tell what it is yet?
WheeeayiiiiiieeeeEEeeee!
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