Tag: science

Brain Compression

The visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences similar to methods used for video data compression.

we have now demonstrated that the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences

2015-03-13: That’s clever visual cortex hacking.

“These GIFs use depth of field and graphic elements to achieve their effect, just like many classic paintings. The white lines define the plane where the screen is, creating a mental division between background, midplane and foreground. Combined with the camera’s depth of field blur, it tricks our brain into thinking that things are popping out of the screen.”


2022-02-18: Visual Stability

Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems remarkably stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for an online mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time. As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging. We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago. We propose that, because of an underlying active mechanism of serial dependence, the representation of the object is continuously merged over time, and the consequence is an illusory stability in which object appearance is biased toward the past. Our results provide a direct demonstration of the link between serial dependence in visual representations and perceived visual stability in everyday life.

Laughter and MIRTH

This is excellent trolling, a study on the damaging effects of laughter. To lol or notlol is the question

Laughter is not purely beneficial. The harms it can cause are immediate and dose related, the risks being highest for Homeric (uncontrollable) laughter. The benefit-harm balance is probably favorable. It remains to be seen whether sick jokes make you ill or jokes in bad taste cause dysgeusia, and whether our views on comedians stand up to further scrutiny.

Multiple hominids

as well as interbreeding with the ancestors of Oceanians, they also bred with Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans in China and other parts of East Asia. Most surprisingly, the genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30 ka ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.

Twin Primes Conjecture

similar excitement to andrew wiles & fermat’s last theorem from a few years ago. you can follow progress here

an obscure mathematician — one whose talents had gone so unrecognized that he had worked at a Subway restaurant to make ends meet — garnered worldwide attention and accolades from the mathematics community for settling a long-standing open question about prime numbers, those numbers divisible by only 1 and themselves. Yitang Zhang showed that even though primes get increasingly rare as you go further out along the number line, you will never stop finding pairs of primes separated by at most 70M. His finding was the first time anyone had managed to put a finite bound on the gaps between prime numbers, representing a major leap toward proving the centuries-old twin primes conjecture