How the human brain processes visual data from the retinas..

[rinselberg]

Have 40 minutes to "blow"..? Or just 20 minutes? I just played this 40-minute on line audio presentation which touches on how the human brain processes optical data from the retinas to create our sense of "vision".

Entertaining and fairly easy to listen to. The first 20 minutes are lecture, and the next 20 minutes are question-and-answer with the audience. The recording was made in 2003. Discusses some interesting (albeit unfortunate) cases of people who suffered certain specific brain damage and had strange forms of visual impairment. Like a person who couldn't see movement, but saw the world as a series of static images, as if she were looking directly at the frames recorded on a movie reel. Also discusses the phenomena of "blind sight", in which a person can point to an object that they cannot consciously "see". Mirror neurons--that's also discussed.

You can read about this stuff, but I think it is unusual to be able to just sit back and listen to it on line. (I was listening to it and looking at some other stuff on line at the same time.) So that's why I decided to post this link: See if anyone else takes a chance to listen to it and has anything to say about it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00gpxhb


Look before you leap--here is a brief description in advance of this audio presentation:

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2011...-synapses.html

“Synapses and the Self” by V.S. Ramachandran (2003)
(He speaks perfectly understandable English, despite that name, if you are wondering..)


This post brought to you proudly by "Panda's Thumb"--a "hotbed" of Darwinian evolutionary theory on line(!)

http://pandasthumb.org/