How Do Our Brains Reconstruct the Visual World?

Given that we see the world through two small, flat retinae at the backs of our eyes, it seems remarkable that what each of us perceives is a seamless, three-dimensional visual world.
How Do Our Brains Reconstruct the Visual World?
Bryant Park in Manhattan on July 10, 2015. Your brain controls your visual focus in a busy scene. Benjamin Chasteen/Epoch Times
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Given that we see the world through two small, flat retinae at the backs of our eyes, it seems remarkable that what each of us perceives is a seamless, three-dimensional visual world.

The retinae respond to various wavelengths of light from the world around us. But that’s just the first part of the process. Our brains have to do a lot of work with all that raw data that comes in—stitching it all together, choosing what to concentrate on and what to ignore. It’s the brain that constructs our visual world.

Neuroscience researchers and cognitive scientists have recently made much progress investigating how this process works. My own research focuses on how humans construct the visual world by selecting what visual information to pay attention to and using visual memory to retain it over short periods of time. There’s a lot more than simple sensory input that goes into building our perception of the visual world we live within.

Step One for vision: the eye. (BruceBlaus, CC BY 3.0)
Step One for vision: the eye. BruceBlaus, CC BY 3.0
Alex Burmester
Alex Burmester
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