Eyes and brain create the reality

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Human ability to see what you want to see is determined by the brain creating virtual sensations all the time, proves new scientific research. Scientists have registered the activity of neural cells in the brain when the eyes were closed. This activity amazingly resembles neural activity caused by the pictures seen in reality. Just as a non-tuned TV sometimes shows random pictures, the resting brain produces randomly clear images as if the eyes are watching something.

The meaning of such conditions is still unknown, but the majority of scientists think that such virtual images represent the brain’s attempts to foresee what the reality will look like at some moment of time. Besides, stimulation of closed eyes or focus on images will significantly  improve the quality of images projected by the brain.

The brain is constantly browsing such pictures as navigation charts as if trying to adjust to what it is going to see when we open our eyes. What we prepare us for is then easier to see than anything else. We can totally miss something we have not been focused on. The brain's visual cortex has the ability to perceive better vertical and horizontal images, and that explains why people recognize vertical or horizontal objects better than non-formed ones.

Today, the dominating theory is the theory “bottom to top” which says that information is sent from the eyes towards the higher neural activity centers, but numerous experiments support the “top to bottom” theory, says Dario Ringach from Visual Neuroscience Lab at UCLA.

It means the brain generates the picture of everything around us. The thousand-years-old Indian philosophy stating the surroundins us world is nothing more than an illusion finds its scientific base.

Everyone is a hostage of his own brain. We see only what it allows us to see, which was illustrated by the American specialists. Yoram Bonneh from Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco and his associates asked people  to look at the PC monitor where, on the black background, were three still yellow points with blue ones, chaotically moving around them. They found if you concentrate on blue points, yellow ones disappear now and then. Almost every test person in the group showed the same result.

It seems like the brain has its own ideas of what the world should look like. It picks up the images that match its notions. Sometimes, when those ideas contradict each other, we see phantasmagoric pictures of other worlds due to distorted perception. But those are only different sides of the world we live in every day and which we leave unnoticed.

The state called by Bonneh and his associates motion induced blindness makes the brain to ignore certain information. Scientists think that such effect is present in everyday life all the time, but we just do not pay attention to it. For instance, if you drive on the highway late at night and see plenty of moving lights, the lights of the car driving beside and a little bit forward you disappear from your perception.

Even based on a strictly scientific research, you can conclude that in order to see more things you need not train your eyes or train your observation skills but develop concentration with your eyes closed. This is nothing else than meditation.

For skeptics, there is a fact to think about. Scientists from the Laboratory of the Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, england have built up a structural system of evolution of the human eye, which was then confirmed by scientific data. They found out that light sensitive cells in the eye, rods and cones, were located in the brain at the initial stage of biological evolution.

Light sensitive cells are still present in the brain and have a significant role in the 24-hours human activity cycle. The same cells that moved and formed the eyes have later not only learned to detect the light but to form complex images of the environment.

And it means that eyes always to a greater extent have been equipment that provided projection of virtual brain pictures on our consciousness than real visual perception’s organs.