How the Brain Organizes Everything We See

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a UC Berkeley news release: "Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings."

Re:So Kant Was Right

[Anonymous Coward]

This does not prove the categories are a priori. There were only 5 subjects who all had similar history (upbringing in the modern western world). That is not empirical evidence, at best it is a suggestion.

Re:Please ask google and apple to support webgl

[ColdWetDog]

Here, for the browser deficient:

Warning:This page uses WebGL, an experimental web technology. It will not work in all browsers or on all platforms. For the best experience we recommend using Google Chrome, maximizing the size of your browser window, and closing other running applications (this viewer takes quite a bit of RAM).

It's data intensive and would likely turn your iPhone into a spot welder for the second or two it would take to trash the battery. Some things need REAL COMPUTERS(TM) to work well.

Re:My brain

[Anonymous Coward]

Puts boobs top of the list

Technically speaking, large mammary glands are just an evolutionary trick to get the male of the species to..., Whoa! Would you get a load of those Ta-Tas!!!...

Ahem, uh, where was I, oh yeah. Female breasts are really just mounds of fat tissue... Aw jeez, those are NICE!!

No necessarily how "we" see

[itwasgreektome]

I imagine this would be mapped from the brains of "like" individuals- not necessarily of the same sex, race, etc, but usually from one geographic area. The problem with is that maybe this is not how all brains "map" learned things, but maybe a result of western thinking/education. Perhaps native Americans, who might view trees as just as close to humans as pigs are, might have quite a different "mapping." It would be interesting to see if this was a result of how our education system is (Western species/classification) geared rather than how our brains actually group things (as in, perhaps it is a manifestation of our education system rather than inherent organizational heuristics in the brain).

Re:Please ask google and apple to support webgl

[oculusprime]

You seem to be missing something. These people are scientists. They get paid to publish papers. You can get the paper from Neuron, where it was published. (You can find it elsewhere too if you look.) The online viewer was just gravy, they didn't get paid to do it, they don't get any direct science benefit from it (no ad $ or citations). As a previous poster noted, this uses WebGL which isn't yet available on IOs. Given that most real science is done on real computers, and that his viewer is likely targeted primarily at real scientists, your complaint seems odd.

Re:Please ask google and apple to support webgl

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confused. The job is NOT the visualization. The job is doing the research and publishing the results. The visualization is something extra that is not being paid for. If you want a different visualization, you pay for it.

Not to mention that as others have said, sometimes having better performance is more important than having it work on your toys.