A crazy thing that you don't know about how you see objects!
Are you sure you remember that distant favourite memory of yours?
Saturday, October 16, 2021
We always think of smooth roads, clean streets whenever we talk about the west.
Have you heard of LA? I’m sure you have.
Have you heard of Sunset Boulevard? Umm, maybe not!
Have you heard of potholes in Sunset Boulevard!!? I bet you haven’t!
I’m not even kidding. Listen to this podcast (1:21:00 onwards) where Joe Rogan and Elon Musk discuss airless tyres and LA potholes.
Do you know that brain generates it’s own reality even before receiving information from the eyes and other senses? This is known as internal model. What we see is basically less because of the photons falling on our eyes and more because of what is already stored inside the brain. This can clearly be understood by the brain’s anatomy. Thalamus sits between the eyes at the front of the head and the visual cortex at the back of the head. Visual information goes to the visual cortex, so there are a huge number of connections going from thalamus to the visual cortex. But what is surprising is that there are 10 times more connections going from visual cortex to the thalamus. The ideal flow should have been that the photon falling on the eyes gets converted to electrochemical signals which are then transferred to the visual cortex via thalamus. The complex signals are processed there and the information is then sent back. This is how ideally we should see an object. But in reality what happens is that the visual cortex sends the information to the thalamus even before it receives the information from the eyes. This is basically the *guessed/predicted* information that the visual cortex sends to the thalamus. Thalamus compares it with the signals coming from the eyes and sends only the difference to the visual cortex. Thalamus doesn't send the complete signal. It basically reports the difference in what the visual cortex has sent and what the eyes are sending. So at any moment, what we experience as seeing, say a chair or a table, relies less on the light falling onto our eyes and more on whats already inside our head. Isn’t it crazy?
Imagine walking into a park and you find different versions of yourself sitting there. There you are aged at six, as a teenager, in your mid twenties, late thirties, early fifties and all the way through your final years. You could potentially sit together and discuss the same stories about your life because the other person is just a different version of yourself. But will the stories be same? You have the same name, same history, but your version of the stories will differ because you are not the same person. You have different goals and ambitions now as compared to when you were different. Your memory of who you were at 10 is different from who you actually were at 10. You will have different memories that relate back to the same event. Memory is not an accurate video recording of something that happened in the past. It is a fragile brain state of a bygone time. You have a finite number of neurons in your brains and they are designated to multitask. When you experience something new, the neurons start participating in memorising that event and form different connections. If you don’t revisit the earlier memory often, the neurons will start forgetting the brain state and the memory will eventually fade. Each new event needs to establish a new relationship among the finite number of neurons. The surprise however is that a faded memory doesn’t seem faded. It appears as if we remember the full picture. However what we remember is just a little pie and not the nuances of it. Therefore the biggest enemy of memory is memory, and not time.
I am amazed by how things work inside our brain. Aren’t you?
See you next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
Some things that you may find interesting-
Article: Nobody knows what they are doing
Must Watch: Mirror magic
Song I am listening to: Vanilla Twilight by Owl City
Thought of the week: Despite how much we desire it, fame is terrible for happiness.
Thread: The Compound Effect
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