Frog’s Eye to Frog’s Brain, Part III

Ok, let’s get to the underlying science.

Jerry Lettvin with Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts  published a paper in 1959, “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain“, that is truly amazing in what it reveals about evolutionary neurological development.

from the paper:

The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with
the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve
to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is
determined only by size and movement. He will leap to capture any
object the size of an insect or worm, providing it moves like one…

The assumption has always been that the eye mainly senses light,
whose local distribution is transmitted to the brain in a kind of copy by
a mosaic of impulses. Suppose we held otherwise, that the nervous
apparatus in the eye is itself devoted to detecting certain patterns of
light and their changes, corresponding to particular relations in the
visible world…

What are the consequences of this work? Fundamentally, it shows
that the eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized  and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less
accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors.

I think I will just let that sink in for a while.

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