Do you think?

[Sam Slater]

I think your answer is rather vague. Give me something specific, or concrete, that you can do which us mere mortals cannot.

Cheers.

[Sam Slater]

I hope you're not taking the piss. I did and Shiraz put a jinx on me. I don't really know what a jinx is or what's supposed to happen but it can't be pleasant if it came from him.

These wizards can get really narky.

[eroticartist]

Deano,
Very perceptive, and you have realised there is "out there" and inside your head. There really is a screen inside your head and nerves connecting it are just wires, they are colour coded. The ones that I saw severed were bright red and blue and inside metallic copper or gold colour. Some scientists did a test once they had volunteers and got them to adjust mirrors that were distorted by four corner screws to the image that they thought really was a likeness of themselves, guess what? No-one knew what they really looked like!
Mike Freeman

[eroticartist]

I re-iterate where do you see that image? I think that you see it in the visual cortex on a screen.
Mike Freeman.

[Deano!]

I saw a documentary about 15 years ago about visual research on monkeys. It covered some of the gruesome experiments they used to do on monkeys in the eastern-block countries.

To my amazement, they were able to detect patterns of signals (neurons firing I guess) which corresponded very closely with the basic shapes the monkey was looking at.

This sounds very close to your idea that at some stage, vision involves a representation of the image laid out in the same arrangement as the scene it comes from. When I told the ophthalmologists I work with about this, they seemed unimpressed, however their expertise is in the physiology of the eye and basically getting the image down the optic nerve. After that I think it becomes the work of visual psychologists and neurologists and this is where we need a neurologist who likes wanking off to Jo Guest to join our forum and help us out.

My own uneducated, worthless theory about vision is:-

Our vision operates at at least 2 levels.
First, we have a basic vision system which enables us 'see things'. Secondly, at the higher level we use the images from this basic system and apply meanings and feelings to those images and scenes in our imagination. The imagination is where you can conjure up scenes which have never happened and seem to be made up from feelings attached to real images rather than actually 'seeing it' in your imagination. The mind might use some sort of internal language system which converts images into symbols. These symbols are then manipulated according to a set of rules based on the real world. This technique allows to plan ahead and predict how events will unfold. Even blind people use this system I think.

It is very hard to imagine impossible scenes too. Try imagining a ball 12 inches in diameter dropping into a box only 6 inches square without the ball being squashed of any left poking out of the box. My imagination wont allow that image to occur even though its not really happening. My mind is constrained by reality.

Unfortunately, I can imagine being sucked off by Prince Phillip - but I don't bother.

[Jonone]

If you read about places like Porton Down you'll appreciate that it wasn't/ isn't just Eastern Bloc countries experimenting with monkeys.

[Jonone]

Two people who conducted a lot of research with primates

[Deano!]

Interesting Reg. I have heard that down here in drunken Oz when the first white men arrived from merry 'ol England in ships and then waded ashore wearing clothes, the older Aborigines did not recognise them as humans because they just looked so different to anything they'd ever associated with people. The younger ones however were able to accept them as similar beings. The younger Aboriginals were still able to accept the difference yet recognise the underlying similarity.

Modern society is similar I guess.