8.3.2. How It Works (2)
All these demonstrations show just how effective correlations over time are in molding our perception. And not just perceptionsynchronizing stimuli can actually alter your body image, where your brain believes your hands are [Hack #64], for instance. The heart of the thing is similarif two things correlate exactly, our perception treats them as part of the same object. For our brains, isolated inside the skull, perceived correlation is the only way we’ve ever had for deducing what sensations should be associated together as part of the same object.
Common fate can also draw inferences from points of light moving in much more complex ways than rotating spheres. For the case of biological motion [Hack #77], the visual system is specifically prepared to fit moving points into a schema based upon the human body to help perception of the human form. Alais et al. have suggested that the importance of common fate reflects a deeper principle of the brain’s organization.2 Neuroscientists talk about the binding problem, the question of how the brain correctly connects together all the information it is dealing with: all the things that are happening in different parts of the world, detected by different senses, whose component parts have properties represented in different cortical areas (such as color, contrast, sounds, and so on), all of which have to be knitted together into a coherent perception. The suggestion is that common fate reflects synchronization of neuron firingand that is this same mechanism that may underlie the brain’s solution to the binding problem.
8.3.3. End Notes
Part of Jim Levin’s “Gestalt Principles & Web Design” (http://tepserver.ucsd.edu:16080/~jlevin/gp). Applet developed by Adam Doppelt.
Alais, D., Blake, R., & Lee, S. (1998). Visual features that vary together over time group together over space. Nature Neuroscience. 1(2), 160-164.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
