So here I am, scribbling up a summary of this ridiculous book on our visual system. It's a very visceral and vivid piece of writing, and it lends itself well to a sentence-to-page sort of ratio. Yet I'm only a tiny way into it, when I realize- it's all true.
Here's the gist:
Our vision “looks” for four things: the shape, the shiny, the light, and the sight-line. That’s it. These four calculations are what constitute our visual system, sole tenant of our occipital lobe. The early visual system sorts out which changes in these things are due to what reasons, and then creates images in which these reasons are easily distinguished. Got it?
These Four Factors (FFs) are so incredibly significant that our entire visual representation is built around creating them. What you see is a result of How: Shaped, Shiny, Lit, and Seen a surface is. Ah, a surface! you cry. I can grasp what’s going on here. Indeed. The physical aspects of a four-dimensional object are well represented by a model which features the FFs, for Four Factors. So our mammal primate body built us a visual system which understands the FFs.
Stage 1: the Primal Sketch. Vital information such as intensity changes, local geometry, and luminosity are encoded ever so briefly in a rough scrawl. Then, soon after, a bunch of other cool things happen to that Primal Sketch and a 2 ½-D (two-and-a-half dimensional) image is rendered- again, by the weird neurons of the occipital lobe, aka the early vision system, or V1. Then the two sketches are placed atop one another, logically, in a viewer-centric perspective.
Isn't that frustrating? Color doesn't appear until V4, by which point I've almost lost interest. Yet I'm also reminded of how unabashedly atheistic most of this psychophysics is, and then I keep going.
