Are we trapped in caves of our biology ?

No doubt our eyes are a marvellous piece of on-board instruments on our body that delivers this magnificent world to us day and night. In an earlier post I touched a bit about how our vision is constructed from the sensations received by photoreceptor cells in the eye, specially about the gaps in our field of vision and how they are being filled for us.

The genesis of the observation was that our biology does not give a damn about what is ‘out there’, its job is not to find out the true nature of reality, all it needs is a good enough model to make some fundamental decisions about how to survive, thrive and pass on the baton to next generation.

Even though we humans may are living complicated lives and for us to remain relevant in the society we need answers to gazillion questions, but if we look under the hoods all our dilemmas, predicaments, deliberations, musings, reverie, squabbles, conflicts, congruity stem from these fundamental questions.

Is it a prey?

Is it a predator?

Is it a mate?

So knowingly or unknowingly we end up answering these questions. In order to advance our understating we need models, or precisely to build our models we need pre existing models, simple models to build the complex models. So lets explore a simple model, model of a frog and what role does its eye play in making critical decisions for its survival.

There is a classical piece of research conducted a long time ago by guy called Jerry Lettvin, Jerry was an engineer at MIT, the paper titled “What a frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain” was published in Proceedings of the IRE 1959.

They recorded the data from individual nerve fibers in the optic nerve and discovered that many of the neurons were extremely selective for the kinds of things that frogs do care about and they interpreted the findings in light of frogs behaviour.

“A frog hunts on land by vision….The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement. He will leap to capture any object the size of an insect or worm, provided it moves like one. He can be fooled easily not only by a bit of dangled meat but by any moving small object.”

They reported that frog’s eye tells the frog only four things about his world.

Local sharp edges and contrast; to find out water’s edge and where does the scene begin and ends, to set the stage for the drama of perception to take place. The curvature of edge of a dark object; To tells the size and overall shape of the object, to find out that it is a bug or a stork, they called it bug perceivers. The movement of edges; To jump in the water if the object that is moving is stork or leap at the object if it is bug. The local dimmings produced by movement or rapid general darkening, probably something big is approaching, stork is close by.

They found that each of these operations are performed by a dedicated group of fibers with each group connected to a separate sheet, they found four different types of neurons that responded selectively for different kinds of stimuli. Here’s how Lettvin described them in action.

“To our minds, this group contains the most remarkable elements in the optic nerve… We have been tempted to call them bug perceivers… A delightful exhibit uses a large color photograph of the natural habitat of a frog from a frog’s eye view [of course, with] flowers and grass. We can move this photograph… waving it around… and there is no response. If we perch with a magnet a fly-sized object on the… picture… and move only the object we get an excellent response. If the object is fixed to the picture… and the whole moved about, then there is none. Could one better describe a system for detecting an accessible bug?”

Here is an interesting animation video on vimeo (A short film (6:30) by Skip Battaglia) that beautifully demonstrated frogs’ perception.

Now where does it leave us, the intelligent frogs, what kind of conditioning our perception is built on, how do we know that what we see is what is out there. Just like Plato’s cave are we trapped in caves of our own biology.

We know that we can only detect the movements that are relevant to us. For example we can see the moving water but not movement of individual molecules of water. We can dip our toes in it and tell its temperature but can’t measure the kinetic energy of individual molecules.

Unfortunately this is bad news for those in search of ultimate truths, they will never be able to get rid of their biological conditioning and embrace what is out there.

But for a curious mind …

a curious mind
on the grind
has to traverse
converse
not to coerce
the unseen
the unknown
the uncharted
contours of nature
there is a lot
in the plot
beyond my stature
there are endless possibilities
possibilities in this haze
what ‘I’ know
is not what ‘I’ see I see
the limits limits of ‘I’ and ‘me’
rabbit holes
moles of hills
hills of moles
random dots
chunked up wholes
endless maze
oh curious frog
clear thy smog
it won’t be rage
If you don’t break
break the limits
limits of thy myopic gaze

Originally published at scriptgrandeur.wordpress.com on March 9, 2015.