October 11, 2023
Visual Perception: The Art of the Brain
Sabine Kastner
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton University
Visual Perception: The Art of the Brain
Sabine Kastner
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton University
Richard Trenner, introducer, and Sabine Kastner
Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the 82nd Year
John Cotton opened the sixth meeting of the 82nd year at 10:15 AM on October 11, 2023, to 125 attendees. Julia Cole led the invocation. Abbreviated minutes of the October 4th meeting were prepared and read by Larry Hans. Richard Trenner introduced three guests: Renate Aller, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kay Simon.
John Cotton reminded the membership that the deadline for the regular price membership dues was in one week. John Cotton encouraged taking the trifecta of new vaccinations against influenza, COVID and RSV. John Cotton provided a brief lesson in proper usage of the microphone. John Cotton mentioned the availability of updated badges and thumb drives for members now with emeritus status or full membership. The speaker at the next meeting on October 18, will be Mark Freda, Mayor of Princeton since January 2021. His topic will be “Perspectives on Governing Princeton.”
Richard Trenner introduced the speaker, Professor Sabine Kastner, whose talk was entitled, “Visual Perceptions: The Art of the Brain.” In his introduction, Richard Trenner artfully truncated Professor Kastner’s distinguished path to Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton University, Scientific Director of Princeton’s neuroimaging facility, and Director of the Silvio O. Conte Center for Basic Research.
Professor Kastner demonstrated how clues from the physical world drive perception based on prior presumptions using Magritte’s painting, “The Human Condition.”
The hollow face illusion, in which a concave mask of Albert Einstein could appear to be convex, demonstrated that our brains can override real world physics, biasing how our perception. Thus, we can perceive the opposite of the physical world.
Dr. Kastner demonstrated that in about 50 msec, the brain is capable of efficiently and accurately extracting and processing complex information.
She showed the similarities between monkey and human brains, explaining that the retina projects what it senses onto the back of the brain so that the brain can then “work its magic” through pathways that are organized like a complex subway map.
The visual brain first filters everything in front of us with no meaning to the input. Next, colors are filtered. Semantic information is stored elsewhere, in the temporal cortex, as first described by Charlie Gross in 1969. There, single selective nerve cells carry specific information: For example, one cell responds only to a hand, but not to other objects with similar characteristics such as mittens or forks. Our brains can learn new categories, so after the next election we will all have new brain cells representing the new president, as was demonstrated in 1998 when “Clinton cells” were discovered.
Filter glasses (one side red and the other green) demonstrated that the brain handles binocular ambiguity by alternating input perceived through right and left eyes. In one example, Professor Kastner playfully suggested good people would see Yoda for longer while bad people would tend to see Darth Vader for longer.
Context was shown to influence how we make sense of information. In the context of a simple series, the same image could be interpreted as representing either the letter B or the number 13.
Templates further enable interpretation of input as demonstrated using representations of a fish and a Dalmatian dog.
Eye movements indicate that primates are interested in other primates, spending the most time looking at eyes and the mouth. In autism spectrum disorder, patients spend less time scanning the eyes than normal controls.
A student’s thesis project showed that by changing the name on a painting, the artist can influence viewer’s scanning patterns. Mondrian’s “Composition IV” evoked radically different scanning patterns when renamed “The Maze” or “The Shattered Cross.” This power of suggestion was confirmed when Bruegel’s “Hunters in the Snow” was renamed “Preying Hawk” or “No-Title.”
As promised, Dr. Kastner reduced scientific facts to make them intuitive.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathy Aleš
John Cotton opened the sixth meeting of the 82nd year at 10:15 AM on October 11, 2023, to 125 attendees. Julia Cole led the invocation. Abbreviated minutes of the October 4th meeting were prepared and read by Larry Hans. Richard Trenner introduced three guests: Renate Aller, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kay Simon.
John Cotton reminded the membership that the deadline for the regular price membership dues was in one week. John Cotton encouraged taking the trifecta of new vaccinations against influenza, COVID and RSV. John Cotton provided a brief lesson in proper usage of the microphone. John Cotton mentioned the availability of updated badges and thumb drives for members now with emeritus status or full membership. The speaker at the next meeting on October 18, will be Mark Freda, Mayor of Princeton since January 2021. His topic will be “Perspectives on Governing Princeton.”
Richard Trenner introduced the speaker, Professor Sabine Kastner, whose talk was entitled, “Visual Perceptions: The Art of the Brain.” In his introduction, Richard Trenner artfully truncated Professor Kastner’s distinguished path to Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton University, Scientific Director of Princeton’s neuroimaging facility, and Director of the Silvio O. Conte Center for Basic Research.
Professor Kastner demonstrated how clues from the physical world drive perception based on prior presumptions using Magritte’s painting, “The Human Condition.”
The hollow face illusion, in which a concave mask of Albert Einstein could appear to be convex, demonstrated that our brains can override real world physics, biasing how our perception. Thus, we can perceive the opposite of the physical world.
Dr. Kastner demonstrated that in about 50 msec, the brain is capable of efficiently and accurately extracting and processing complex information.
She showed the similarities between monkey and human brains, explaining that the retina projects what it senses onto the back of the brain so that the brain can then “work its magic” through pathways that are organized like a complex subway map.
The visual brain first filters everything in front of us with no meaning to the input. Next, colors are filtered. Semantic information is stored elsewhere, in the temporal cortex, as first described by Charlie Gross in 1969. There, single selective nerve cells carry specific information: For example, one cell responds only to a hand, but not to other objects with similar characteristics such as mittens or forks. Our brains can learn new categories, so after the next election we will all have new brain cells representing the new president, as was demonstrated in 1998 when “Clinton cells” were discovered.
Filter glasses (one side red and the other green) demonstrated that the brain handles binocular ambiguity by alternating input perceived through right and left eyes. In one example, Professor Kastner playfully suggested good people would see Yoda for longer while bad people would tend to see Darth Vader for longer.
Context was shown to influence how we make sense of information. In the context of a simple series, the same image could be interpreted as representing either the letter B or the number 13.
Templates further enable interpretation of input as demonstrated using representations of a fish and a Dalmatian dog.
Eye movements indicate that primates are interested in other primates, spending the most time looking at eyes and the mouth. In autism spectrum disorder, patients spend less time scanning the eyes than normal controls.
A student’s thesis project showed that by changing the name on a painting, the artist can influence viewer’s scanning patterns. Mondrian’s “Composition IV” evoked radically different scanning patterns when renamed “The Maze” or “The Shattered Cross.” This power of suggestion was confirmed when Bruegel’s “Hunters in the Snow” was renamed “Preying Hawk” or “No-Title.”
As promised, Dr. Kastner reduced scientific facts to make them intuitive.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathy Aleš