20 SEP 2025 by ideonexus
Monarchies Depend on Illiteracy
Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.
And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.
This was what historians of the seventeenth centur... 1 
notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
A Second is Subjective
How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec
A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life, you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience, and a quiet weekend can disap...
1 Terrence Sejnowski on how a moment of time is a subjective experience that grows longer the more novelty is packed into it.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Hyperacuity and Obligatory Looking
Beginning about four months of age, the perception of detail takes another leap forward with the emergence of hyperacuity: the ability to discriminate features that are up to ten times finer than the size of the photoreceptors should theoretically permit. It is this ultrafine discrimination that allows us, for instance, to see a very slight glitch in an otherwise straight line. even though the size of the glitch is below our eyes' limit of resolution. It is not yet known how our brains perfor... 1 notes
notesTwo visual phenomena in the developing infant. One is the ability to make out visual details for which the eye does not appear physically capable of registering and the other is a conflict between the visual cortex and the brain stem that gets the baby stuck staring at something.
19 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
What Makes Something a Distinct Object?
Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view,
that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me
if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina
I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges,
two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and
triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same
time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk
is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in y...Folksonomies: perception
Folksonomies: perception
1 notes
notesOur perceptions are built on photons hitting our retinas and pressure variations tickling the folicles in our cochleas... so how does all that become something distinct in our mind's eye?
