Your Brain’s Perception video:
Heather Berlin asks the question of how our matter becomes thoughts. Our whole experience depends on our brains and how it turns input into electrochemical signals. Our thoughts are a representation of reality, rather than reality, because neurons compete with each other to send impulses that will tell us what is going on around us.
We only see detail in 1% of our vision because our focus is on a very small part of what we actually see. Our eyes also sample pieces of our vision and our brain fills in the rest based on that. We have about 130 million light-sensitive cells on our retina. Our brain also does this with audio. The visual example of this is ‘The Dress,’ and similarly, the ‘Yanny/Laurel’ audio, which sparked huge public debates.
Scientists’ explanation of this is that our brain’s job is to predict the next thing that will happen, rather than present the world to us accurately. Our brain learns rules that apply to the world and then realizes the exceptions to the rules in order to keep us alive.
This is similar to AI models, which learn a set of rules and use them to predict the answers to questions. An emergent property of this was that when scientists gave models even a simple set of rules, it was able to do very complex actions.
In our brain, each memory creates new synapses on the neuron. Every time you remember something, you add noise to it, so it becomes much more susceptible to change.
The discussion of how our perception of the world is different than what may actually be leads into how colors are percieved, specifically how colors can be percieved on the web vs. in printed material. In GIMP, photos can be converted to 2 color, 4 color, or full color images. This image is an indexed photo from GIMP that is only 38 colors.