Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 53

The feature detection approach to studying how our brain physiology enables our perceptions, outlines a Euclidian domain to be explored. This approach, though initially exciting to the neuroscience community, has been shown wanting: research in my laboratory and that of others showed that the receptive fields of cells in the brain’s visual cortex are not limited to detecting one or another sensory stimulus.

Instead, research in my laboratory, and that of others, showed that a feature, relevant to a particular situation, is identified by being extracted from a set of available features.

The frequency approach, based on recording the spectral dimensions of arcs of excitation subtended over the curvature of the retina, is essentially Pythagorean. Deeper insights into complex processing are obtained, insights that can provide the basis for identifying features.

Neither approach discerns the objects that populate the world we navigate, the subject of Chapter 6.