The human digestive and visual systems did clearly evolve over a very long period.
What is the nature of the genetic endowment? How does acquisition proceed? Etc. Scientists do routinely ask similar questions about the visual system, system of motor organisation, and others - including, in fact, the digestive system.
Thus there is no doubt the eye was intended for us to see with.
Light has called forth one organ to become its like, and thus the eye is formed by the light and for the light so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light.
The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.
At Oculus, we're now looking at eye specialists, people who really understand how the human eye works, and how that affects human emotion.
Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.
The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.
The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.
One of the things I really love about 3D is that because as we grow older on eye weakens more than the other, 3D becomes more difficult for adults to watch than it is for children who have very balanced eyes often.
One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.
I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.
Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?
We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.
When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits, and the brain adapts to it.
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.
Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.
The fruit flies we work with have the equivalent of about a 25 by 25 pixel camera. But that camera is very, very fast, about 10 times faster than the human visual system.
