Despite what you may think, your brain is a mathematical genius

[G_j]

http://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-brain-mathematical-genius.html



The irony of getting away to a remote place is you usually have to fight traffic to get there. After hours of dodging dangerous drivers, you finally arrive at that quiet mountain retreat, stare at the gentle waters of a pristine lake, and congratulate your tired self on having "turned off your brain."

"Actually, you've just given your brain a whole new challenge," says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. "You may think you're resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving?

The dilemma is that our brains can only dedicate so many neurons to this assessment, says Sergei Gepshtein, a staff scientist in Salk's Vision Center Laboratory. "It's a problem in economy of resources: If the visual system has limited resources..

Summing up, Albright says, "Simply put, it's a tradeoff: The price of getting better at one thing is getting worse at another."

..more..

[babylonsister]

1. Dammit, no more vacations.

I kid! Very interesting!

[Octafish]

2. 'A Gabor wavelet transform'

Incredible stuff. From the OP:

"In human vision, stimuli are first encoded by neural cells whose response characteristics, called receptive fields, have different sizes," he explains. "The neural cells that have larger receptive fields are sensitive to lower spatial frequencies than the cells that have smaller receptive fields. For this reason, the operations performed by biological vision can be described by a Gabor wavelet transform."

[G_j]

3. I know

remarkable complexity, mind blowing

[Octafish]

4. Our minds, a giant hologram generator.

Or do our minds generate the Giant Hologram?

Either way, both, neither: Who cares? We're lucky to experience this wonderful thing, whatever it is.

[Octafish]

5. ''Blessed.''

We're not lucky, we're blessed.

"The enlightened being knows he is blessed." -- Swami Somebodyoranother

[G_j]

6. yes we are

and we can enjoy it without
destroying the world around us,