PSL300H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Shigeo Fukuda, Sensory Neuron, Sensory System
Document Summary
Sensory inference: the brain interpreting ambiguous sensor signals using prior knowledge. Sensory data compression: neurons distilling vital information from a flood of sensory data. The brain guesses what it sees (very well) because the data input from the senses are incomplete and ambiguous: the brain infers what happens in the world based on experience. Senses have evolved to guide behaviour to steer away from danger and toward survival and reproduction. Identifying objects seem simple because humans are good at it humans can identify things after seeing their image for 100 ms and all of this happens unconsciously. It is possible to fool the brain, because its interpretations are guesses. In the kanizsa illusion it looks like there are 2 overlapping triangles, but in reality there are none in the image (cuts outs are perfectly aligned that it creates an illusion) The brain infers based on experience that come from a persons" own past, or from evolutionary ancestors.
