Cousin Ricky wrote:
> Short answer:  Your brain is messing with you.

There's a lovely book published many years ago by Byte magazine called 
"The Brains of Men and Machines."  It describes everything from vision, 
kinesthetics, planning, emotion, and actuation in terms of computers, an 
in particular op-amps and algorithms. For example, your eyes have 
already separated what you see into edges and objects before the signal 
leaves your eyeballs, and has separated objects from each other and 
background and split out the positional information from the visual 
information before it gets all the way to your brain. There are "blind" 
people who know something is there but doesn't know what it is, because 
the "what is it" part got broken while the "where is it part" was 
undamaged, for example. The book is both readable and fascinating.

I think I'll put it on my stack to read again. The nice thing is, stuff 
like this really doesn't go out of date. Brains don't evolve as fast as 
computers.

Ernest Kent
ISBN 0-70-034123-0



-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     This octopus isn't tasty. Too many
     tentacles, not enough chops.

Post a reply to this message