Big Brained

I’m currently plowing my way through Global Brain by Howard Bloom. It’s a good, if chunky, read about the history of collective consciousness and group thinking. Sort of reinforces Scott Adams’ proposition that we’re all just “moist robots”. One passage in particular caught my attention. Bloom is outlining how visual perception takes place.

“…Cells in the retina scrap 75 percent of the light which pours in through the lens of the eye. They diddle mercilessly with what’s left, transmogrifying the photons of which light is made into pulses of electrons and bursts of unpronounceable chemicals like lumirhodopsin. They fiddle with the contrast, tamper with the sense of space, and report not the location of what we’re watching, but where the retinal cells calculate it soon will be…… Adding insult to injury, the eye crushes the information it’s already fuddled, compacting the landslide of data from 125 million neurons down to a code able to squeeze through a cable – the optic nerve – a mere 1 million neurons in size. On the way to the brain, the constricted stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched, and modified with flows of input from ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating the tilt and trajectory of the head, hands, legs, and torso. The rearranged gumbo is sent off to the visual cortex, where it is divvied up again….. Finally, a council of representatives from the superior colliculus, the thalamus, the locus coeruleus, the hypothalamus, and the occipital cortex poll their squabble of conclusions and cast a vote on what the twinges of light impinging on the retina might be. Not until they’ve agreed on an image do they send it to the left cerebral hemisphere, presenting it to the conscious mind as a paranormal accompli. What we see is no the product of direct perception, but a reconstruction bordering on collage artistry.”

Or as the haggard old detective once told me: “Eye witnesses suck”. Even more succinctly told to me by a crusty, tattooed Master Chief when I was 16: “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see”. An excellent read thus far. Along the same lines as Bill Bryson’s *A Short History of Nearly Everything. Wish there had been science books like this when I was growing up.

Ares