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Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

news.berkeley.edu

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Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, Kant himself structured the idea of the world outside our field of experience in a critique of pure reason. Since then the idea that our experience is a perfect one and that all our ideas come from our experience has been questioned. This is why when the interviewed said "We assume our perception is a perfect reflection of the physical world around us" it was really strange for me. Only those unaware o…

> Only those unaware of hundreds of years of advance in philosophy assume that So then, nearly all children, and most of your average working-class people? Seems to me the author was just tailoring the piece for a layperson audience, which is kinda the default writing approach.

It really makes more sense as a rethorical and argumentative artifact. I guess I misinterpreted the purpose of that statement.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#22
My understanding is that you only have a relatively small area in the center of your vision where you get a clear image. And so your eye moves back and forth so rapidly that you can't tell without slow motion, sort of scanning in the environment into a 3d map.

So maybe some of the variability is in that mapping circuitry.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only those unaware of hundreds of years of advance in philosophy assume that So then, nearly all children, and most of your average working-class people? Seems to me the author was just tailoring the piece for a layperson audience, which is kinda the default writing approach.

I would say even a lot of very educated people, despite maybe having read about these topics, will still feel and act as if what they are perceiving is reality itself. I'm actually very surprised to see so many comments here dismissing the article as something almost obvious.

that is because this thread is about a scientific publication in a respectable university site, it suffers a different level of scrutiny.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#24
post #19
post #14

This clicked with me when I watched The Brain with David Eagleman [1] on BBC a little while ago. I've always know there is a disconnect between reality and what you interpret but the way he described it stuck. Note this is my layman's way of describing how I understand it. Firstly your eyes are not connected directly to your "brain". You don't see what is in front of you. Your eyes write a rough scan of elements of w…

It's also multiple frame buffers. The nerves before the brain already do some interpretation, and the brain an optimized version. And the brain can rewrite the history it saved if it finds logical errors that came up because of it filling in gaps wrong. Brains are awesome and scary.

That's the ultimate eventual consistency.

When you realize your previous approximation leads to a discontinuous function after new data arrives, just roll back your instruction pointer as well as your perception of time.

This ability to retroactively error-correct without affecting perceived continuity could also be affording our brains a greater margin of error.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#25
My father was a photographer and over the decades he worked with many other photographers in his darkroom (this was in the era of chemical photography). After several hundred occasions when he and another photographer were looking at a print under the color balancer, he realized they were literally seeing different colors. My father, who was scientifically inclined, eventually worked out the average variation, which I want to say was two clicks on the projector, but I’d need to check to find out what that actually meant in terms of frequencies. It’s a small variation, but it was certainly real. Remember, these were all professionals with years of skill at judging color.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#26

> “We assume our perception is a perfect reflection of the physical world around us, but this study shows that each of us has a unique visual fingerprint,” I don’t think anyone makes that assumption. I think most people know we don’t actually “see” the physical world, our eyes receive electrical signals from photons and our brain interprets those signals and for lack of a better word we hallucinate the physical world…

Anecdotally I've always perceived that dress as blue/brown from the very beginning and I can't "switch" my vision to perceive it otherwise. It's incomprehensible to me that someone can see it as blue/white or even worse as black/gold :)

On the flipside, I've experienced the dress thing before the dress itself - for me, it was entirely the difference between being used to sunlight vs indoor light. If I was currently used to the brighter sunlight I'd see it one way, after adjusting to indoor blue-r light I'd see it the other way.

After realizing that cause, I was able to change how I viewed the dress willingly.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#27
post #14

This clicked with me when I watched The Brain with David Eagleman [1] on BBC a little while ago. I've always know there is a disconnect between reality and what you interpret but the way he described it stuck. Note this is my layman's way of describing how I understand it. Firstly your eyes are not connected directly to your "brain". You don't see what is in front of you. Your eyes write a rough scan of elements of w…

It seems our biological neural networks, probably, aren't all that different from the ones we write. In their 'scope' they basically do just enough, for us to function. Beyond that, evolution probably started to optimise other things.

"Just enough" would mean being able to agree upon whether the object being seen was a danger (say a wild animal, an enemy tribe) or not (a friendly tribe). This goes deep enough for us to agree upon facial expressions and the like.

Interestingly, the 'lack of agreement' would theoretically be impossible to detect, because for consensus, we would achieve "eventual consistency" of conclusions - thereby reforming the neural pathways of all individuals.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#28

Relevant Ted talk: "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Set" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

Timothy Leary was telling everyone this decades ago, of course.

Crowley also mentioned it, very likely others before them too

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timothy Leary was telling everyone this decades ago, of course.

Crowley also mentioned it, very likely others before them too

Yup, it's also been said (maybe not using the words hallucination), by sages and philosophers in India and Asia for thousands of years now.

Re: Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

#30
I watched a program on PBS back in the mid 80's about San Fransisco and the Haight Asbury Free clinic.

They were speaking with a doctor about "acid casualties" LSD. What the doctor said was really interesting.

People who have flashbacks get scared thinking their brain is fried, and it's usually triggered by something visual. The patients have visual "abnormalities" and it scares them into thinking a new acid trip will start. In reality what LSD, Mushrooms, Peyote, etc. can do is strip away all the adaptations in the visual system. He said in most cultures that use psychedelics they usually talk about cleansing, or stripping away when using psychedelics, and with the visual system it's a true statement.

When he went on to say was that when we are born our visual system is like a blank downloadable computer, and as we grow, the visual part of our brain is making adaptations based on what it knows vs what is 'senses'. He said that due to small eye movements the sensing would jiggle, especially in our peripheral vision, but we learn the the world doesn't jiggle, so the visual system makes sure that stable items don't jiggle. Tons of adaptations take place, depending on our lives and experiences some of us have more adaptions than others.

Sometimes when taking psychedelics all those adaptations get stripped out, or only some get stripped out, leaving people with the untrained system, and that untrained system doesn't present things in the same way. Colors don't look the same, sometimes things in the peripheral vision jiggle or move, moving our heads quickly while quickly moving our eyes can cause 'trails'. All indications that our visual system has had some adaptations erased.

The doctor said that eventually over time things get usually restored to normal. However he said for colors, it's interesting because for people that grew up in a different area of the country and had their color perception set at that location, they sometimes find the when wipe out the adaptions and reset things the colors sometimes don't matched. Depending on where they grew up vs where the adaptations get reset the color of the sunlight can be different, and that will alert the color adaptation.

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