http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080602/sc_livescience/keytoallopticalillusionsdiscovered Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions. Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay. Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd. His research on this topic is detailed in the May/June issue of the journal Cognitive Science, Explaining illusions That same seer ability can explain a range of optical illusions, Changizi found. "Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality," Changizi said. Here's how the foresight theory could explain the most common visual illusions - geometric illusions that involve shapes: Something called the Hering illusion, for instance, looks like bike spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are moving forward, and thus, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we aren't actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones. "Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future," Changizi said. "The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward - as we would in the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we move through it - and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."

Yeah this is cool stuff. George Lucas must've know about this effect since didn't he use it in one of his movies where they tested Anakin's skills and he was actually seeing the images slightly ahead of time!
Anyways, this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to study neuroscience if I were to go back to college.

Good ol' client-side prediction :)

I'm leery of Changizi's word choices. They're loaded with baggage.

Quote:
"Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future," Changizi said. "The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward - as we would in the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we move through it - and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."

It seems to me that what he calls "premonitions" might better be termed "projections" or "extrapolations". His word choices don't necessarily affect his findings, but they easily lend themselves to confusion and misconstructions.

I would also be cautious in interpreting these results. It is well reported in neurology and neuropsych literature that we don't actually perceive the current world, but rather our perception lags behind the world by a short interval. What we 'think' we see is actually a mental image formed by the input signals from our sensors AND other functional areas of the brain and it lags reality by a short interval.

I'd like to see the supporting experimental evidence that suggests that the cognitive image we 'see' in our minds is actually a prediction of the future state (that compensates for this delay) formed by a 'predicting' visual pathway, because in all honesty it doesn't need to be for us to be able to actually control things and interact with our world. Control systems can still be stable and perform very well even with information delays within the control loop, so it isn't necessary to propose a 'premonition' model of vision to explain how we catch a ball, or avoid an object while moving.

As for the visual illusions, a competing theory is that because our images of the world are cognitive (rather than direct sensor mappings) AND they rely on other functional areas of the brain, then certain properties of images can trick the brain into doing the wrong cognitive computations. The Hering illusion, for example, could be explained by the fact that our brains first compute the geometry of the image based on the radial lines and then interpret the vertical lines in this 'warped' visual space, making it harder to work out if they are indeed straight or not. You can even force your brain to work differently when you see such illusions, by slightly defocusing your vision when viewing the image... you should see a different effect. If our brains were compensating for 'apparent motion' I wouldn't expect that defocusing would have a significant effect.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea and one that needs more investigation.

LoL @ Client-side prediction ;D

Quote: Original post by LessBread
It seems to me that what he calls "premonitions" might better be termed "projections" or "extrapolations". His word choices don't necessarily affect his findings, but they easily lend themselves to confusion and misconstructions.

I see what you're getting at - mass-media coverage of science is dodgy at the best of times. When you bait the media with words like premonitions, then god knows what kind of head-lines they'll come up with.

Reminds me of the last wikipedia-vandalism story I read where the writer had used words like "the hackers" and "they infiltrated the site from the outside"...

Quote: Original post by Nypyren
Good ol' client-side prediction :)

Yes, i agree. it is very good.