How the brain makes sense of the visual world

“The brain may adopt fairly simple strategies to answer seemingly complex questions..” Pawan Sinha, MIT

Have you ever wondered how on earth that lump of grey matter in your skull makes sense of what the eyes see? Think of the multitude of objects that our senses encounter and the complexity of the sorting that's going on. Our brains are capable of recognising endless variations in the appearance of objects - such as a person in different light settings, at different distances, or with different clothing. But how does this happen? The department of brain and cognitive science at MIT have spent years investigating this subject. They've researched how the brain encodes objects and investigated how it actually achieves this amazing ability for recognising objects.

Initially, it was intuitively hypothesised that our neurons must be somehow seeking and achieving finer edges, but on exploration the idea did not lead anywhere. In fact, it was found that detail features actually only achieved very brittle vision in machine vision. It was discovered that the brain uses a much cruder system, grabbing coarse information and throwing out unnecessary detail. Under these conditions, it was found that machine vision begins to gain robustness and consistency across conditions. A breakthrough.

The theoretical foundations of perception and cognition are utterly fascinating. The wider possibilities of what leads to consciousness and the brain's connection to this process are beautifully illuminated by research such as this. And the importance of side-stepping long-held scientific beliefs in order to make progress happen is clearly evident.

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Khan Academy's Visual Processing lesson.