How does what we see and hear go to our brain to be processed and stored?
In: Biology
Ah! This is a simple question that’s extremely complicated and interesting. So let’s start with the basics!
## Feature, not a bug
The world out there is just there. What we think of as a “table” or a “chair”- any **thing**- is really just a collection of atoms that are close to each other in space and time. The world doesn’t work in terms of things. So why does every_thing_ we experience seem like something distinct from the rest of the world?
That’s because our minds work in terms of things, and thinking in terms of things makes thinking a lot simpler. We can focus on the important parts of what we experience instead of constantly trying to make sense of raw sensory data.
It’s not surprising, then, that the most basic part of seeing or hearing something is a _feature_! In our eyes are a huge bunch of nerve cells that respond to different kinds of light falling on them. And in our eyes and brain, these nerves in turn send information to feature detectors.
Features are really simple things- like “blue colour”, “horizontal line”, “vertical line”, “movement”, and so on. But the lovely part about having everything in your brain be a nerve cell, is that you can keep feeding features into features! And that’s how complicated “things” come to your mind. From the smallest feature that your eyes and mind respond to, eventually the idea of the *thing* you’re looking at is built up.
## The funny thing is…
Even something as simple as a chair can be really complicated. Let’s take a simple chair that everyone knows- square seat, four legs, and a rectangular back. Now each leg itself is made of vertical lines and maybe a couple horizontal ones, and you can see that the leg is separate from the background because there is a sharp contrast between the edge of the leg and the background.
It gets even more fun when you realize that you can “zoom in” and “zoom out” of *anything* you perceive, down to the smallest feature! If your chair is parked at a table, when you “zoom out” you might think of them both as a single “thing”, your dining area. And you can zoom out even more, and just think of the whole room as a single thing.
Or you can mentally zoom into the chair, and look at just the seat. The seat itself is made of individual fibers of wood, individual areas of colour, little imperfections in the manufacturing and dents from years of use… you can mentally zoom in as far as your eyes can see.
And so the _thing_ that’s, quite literally, on our mind at the moment really is dependent all at the same time on what our eyes are seeing, what our brains are registering as features, and what our minds are deciding to focus on.
## Simple is easier, easier is generally better
Because what we see is built from little features, there are lots of things in the world that are designed to trick these feature detectors!
Maybe you’ve heard of white noise- it’s a random hissing noise that some people find relaxing. Why is that so?
Well, one of the features our ears detect is sudden changes in sound volume. And how so! A sudden roar, the crack of a twig, these things could mean that a predator is about to eat us. And so we suddenly pay attention!
In our modern world though, we don’t really need to be that anxious. So white noise helps to “drown out” background noises that might disturb our rest, but which would otherwise be harmless.
Another really cool example is how camouflage works. Remember how our minds and eyes differentiate things from the background by looking for contrast between the edge of the thing and the background? Camouflage patterns break up this outline, confusing our feature detectors that look for where the background stops and where a _thing_ begins. And so our visual system is confused, and while our eyes “see” the thing in a sense, it doesn’t register to our minds as a _thing_.
## About storage… go ask your mom
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about memory to tell you more. It’s definitely an incredibly interesting topic, and I hope you try to find out as much as you can about it!
We have a hard drive from PC World stored up there believe it or not. With age everything dies of death, unfortunately we can’t replace it when it’s gone.
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