Seeing red

[emjay]

@emjay,  specific regions of the cortex appear to be handling specific attributes of the visual field, independently and concurrently (color and shape, depth and velocity, etc).  These regions -never- see the same thing because they can't, they're physically incapable (unless they've got wifi in there)...hooked up to the wrong parts of the eye.   What you "see" appears to be a summary of their collective work.  We don't notice this until one of them presents us with what would be described as anomalous data by reference to the other streams.  An odd combination of color and shape, depth, velocity.  The minority report from just one center working independently of the others, lol.  A "wtf was that!?!" moment.  The eye and visual cortex are probably the best places to look, for now, for the hows and why's of experience.  We spend alot of money and time on our ability to see.

Yes I know... the brain is the ultimate in parallel processing. But the beauty of the brain is it's ability to integrate, through association, information from any source. So even if there are entire brain regions dedicated to a specific task, involving hundreds of layers and transformations, their output still collapses down to neurons firing, and those neurons can be associated with the output neurons from another system. And in principle any of the intermediate layers of processing in any of those systems can project anywhere else in the same way so it's not necessarily limited to what you'd call the 'output layer'. So my levels L1 to L4 were a massive simplification... you could replace any of those levels with a whole subsystem and the net effect would be the same. Similarly the L1 of my example could be the output of some prior processing rather than the raw input data. I think the key is in the circuit that is formed by the projections in the brain so even if you have different input sources in different input layers - say rods and cones separately - they can still be treated as a single input layer depending on where they project to... in other words they don't need WiFi from that perspective The hierarchy of layers and projections in the brain is not a simple 1,2,3 affair but instead a complex arrangement where any layer can project to one or more other layers including itself, so if that was arranged as a hierarchical diagram of layers and their projections it would be extraordinarily complex. For me, the holy grail of neuroscience would be a complete map of the layers and projections in the brain. It won't happen in my lifetime I'm sure but it's already been done it quite some detail for the visual cortex so I do think it will happen one day. So anyway, I'm not ready to give up on this theory just yet, cos it still makes sense to me But yeah, I agree that the visual cortex is probably the best place to look for the hows and why's of experience