Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels.
Ray Kurzweil in
The Singularity is Near, referencing Roska and Werblin’s article in
Nature ‘Vertical Interactions Across Ten Parallel, Stacked Representations in the Mammalian Retina’ (March 29, 2001)
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