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Join The Dots
Why humanity’s salvation doesn’t lie on Mars but begins with neuroscience
When I was a small child I encountered a distraction called “join the dots.” The idea was simple: a page was presented with a seemingly random assortment of small dots, each of which was numbered. By drawing a line between each dot so as to connect them in the order that they were numbered, a picture would emerge.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, this game relied on satisfying the human brain’s hardwired pattern-recognition mechanisms. Over the last century, and particularly over the last fifty years, neuroscience has begun to reveal how our brains process sensory information to create comprehensible models by means of which we interpret the world we live in.
Visual stimuli, for example, are processed sequentially. As signals from the optic nerve travel through the brain, different elements are assembled. In the primary visual cortex, often referred to as V1, early processing focuses on things like orientation (vertical, horizontal) and direction of movement (left-to-right, up-to-down, etc.). At this point, the neurons in V1 are eye-specific; that is, a neuron responding to input from the right eye is unaffected by input from the left eye.
Signals then pass to V2, which responds to contours, textures, and…
