Vision and the Brain

This was a fun set of lectures! Part of the UW Psychology Lecture Series, the first talk by Dr.Murray focused on complexities of object perception in terms of size, brightness, etc. I loved how he started off his lecture with a couple of puzzles (similar to these) that demonstrated how deceptive visual perception can be. The latter part of his talk - about which parts of the brain ostensibly impact perception and interpretation as against just relaying electrical signals seemed to get a little muddier (not surprising given I'm less than a novice at this :)), but was still really interesting (http://faculty.washington.edu/somurray/research.html).

The second lecture by Dr.Goodale focused on how separate parts of the brain seem to be responsible for perceiving objects versus reacting to them. His subject of research was this woman who had sustained severe brain damage in the dorsal stream due to carbon monoxide poisoning - which affected her sense of perception, but left her capacity for controlled action (in response to visual impulses) intact! The latter is apparently controlled by the ventral stream, which in her case was unaffected. Her reactions were really intriguing - she was unable to recognize a pencil for what it is, but when the pencil was handed to her, she held out her palm in the correct position so as to be able to grab it. Her brain was able to receive the electrical signals corresponding to the image of the pencil, but she was not able to perceive what it was, though her brain was able to control her physical reaction to it. (http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/goodale/research/).

*sigh*. That probably doesn't sound very cogent!