How Brain Reconstructs 3D Images

Fooling Visual Neurons Provides New Insight Into How The Brain Reconstructs The Third Dimension

It has recently been revealed that the world we see as a 3D is nothing but a science involving our own brains.A "fabrication" indeed, as it says.

According to this latest study, it is when a person looks at things, their images get projected onto his retina and information about the third dimension is lost a bit like when a 3D object casts a shadow onto a flat, 2D wall. The brain , however reconstructs the image and we visualize it as a convincing 3D one.

"We created the images by taking random noise and smearing it out across the image in specific patterns. It's a bit like finger painting, except it's done by computer", explains Roland Fleming, Professor of Psychology at the University of Giessen. "The way the texture gets smeared out is not the way texture behaves in the real 3D world. But it allows us to selectively stimulate so-called 'complex cells' in visual cortex, which measure the local  2D orientation of patterns in the retinal image".

The authors are now working towards generalizing the findings to other kinds of information about 3D shape, such as shading and highlights.




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