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Our brain is constantly seeking to understand the environment, not in terms of asking profound questions about existence (this is a peculiar pastime we have invented over the last 10,000 years) rather in terms of capturing reality and taking action if action is needed (fight or flee). The information coming from our senses have to be interpreted and an internal model is built. This model serves the purpose of taking decision, fast. It doesn’t matter its accuracy as long as, statistically, it works.
Scientists have been puzzled by illusions for many years. Illusions are the result of a misinterpretation of reality by the brain. We “think” we see the world but actually the world is different. Illusion may be created outside of ourselves (like in mirages where different density of the air bends light rays and gives a false image) or inside the brain. These latter are the ones that are really puzzling scientists and that today, as we are acquiring technology that can re-create reality in a virtual way, are becoming even more intriguing and potentially important.
Just think about this: what we ultimately want is to get the meaning (the holy grail) and it is only in order to get it that we need data from the environment, process theses data and make sense out of them. Data Analytics is a way to shortcut part of this process. Data area analysed by an algorithm (in a computer of some sort) and a summary, sometimes a catchy graphics, is presented. It is a way to quickly process huge amount of data and ge the gist of them.
By learning more about how our senses work and how our brain processes (our) sensors data we can be both more effective and facilitate our brain processing. Take as an example a television screen. It contains twice as many green pixels than red (or blue) pixels. The reason is that our brain is more sensitive to the green colour so b providing more green (as our eyes do) we simplify its job. Or think about how our brain processes sound to get meaning. We learn in our childhood to detect sounds and the brain wires up to detect those sounds. If you are born in an Arabic Country, your brain will learn to distinguish among 5 different sounds of “h”. If you are born in Italy you only learn one sound for “h” ad as you grow old it gets almost impossible to detect the other. Same story for tonal languages. If you are born in China you grow up the capability of distinguishing spoken tones, if you are not .. too bad.
Some companies are cheating in sound reproduction leveraging on the brain actual use of sound data. Since certain sound waves always go hand in hand with others it has been discovered that it is sufficient to present one of them to the brain (hence to the ear) and the brain will fill in the missing ones. It is like reading a text missing a letter. In most situation we can read it perfectly and seldom notice a letter is missing.
As we develop new worlds with virtual and augmented reality, understanding the brain processes becomes more and more important.
A team of researchers in China has studied the Pinna-Brelstaff illusion (see figure) both in humans and macaques. First they tested that the perception of this illusion is similar in the two species, then they used the macaques to study what was going on in their brain as they got involved with the illusion.
The researchers discovered that the illusion is based on a “delayed” reality. The image is processed in the medial superior temporal area (MST) and in the Median Temporal area (MT) of the brain. However, the MT area processes the signal immediately whilst the MST area introduces a delay of about 15ms and this delay is probably what creates the rotational motion effect as you move closer or further from the image. By getting closer (or further away) the points change their position and at a certain speed of movement the delay introduced in the MST area creates the illusion of rotation.
I am pretty sure that as more and more knowledge and understanding on how the brain works will enable the creation of ever more convincing virtual and augmented reality. This is a topic we are now starting to pursue in a new FDC-IEEE Initiative, that is already active in the study of the Brain, leveraging on the present Digital Reality and Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiatives, to move further and explore how Digital Reality can fuel the Digital Transformation, something that has huge implication on business.
