>"A lot of the things you think you see you’re actually making up," said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. "You don’t actually see them."
>Previous efforts to model human vision made wishful assumptions about the architecture of the visual cortex. Young, Shapley and Chariker’s work accepts the demanding, unintuitive biology of the visual cortex as is — and tries to explain how the phenomenon of vision is still possible.
>For a visual area roughly one-quarter the size of a full moon, there are only about 10 nerve cells connecting the retina to the visual cortex.
>Not only are LGN cells scarce — they can’t do much either. LGN cells send a pulse to the visual cortex when they detect a change from dark to light, or vice versa, in their tiny section of the visual field. And that’s all. The lighted world bombards the retina with data, but all the brain has to go on is the meager signaling of a tiny collection of LGN cells. To see the world based on so little information is like trying to reconstruct Moby-Dick from notes on a napkin.
>"You may think of the brain as taking a photograph of what you see in your visual field," Young said. "But the brain doesn’t take a picture, the retina does, and the information passed from the retina to the visual cortex is sparse."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematical-model-unlocks-the-secrets-of-vision-20190821/
Dennett was completely right all along. Most successful and true to biology (i.e. doesn't make up some convoluted scenario where the retina gets more information to the visual cortex than it seems in some not yet discovered way) model for how vision works, and just like he's always argued, it takes in little actual data for imagery with your *impression* of having seen all that detail just being that: An impression. The brain gets to skip to the punchline of "it seemed like a highly detailed movie to you" without bothering to literally "show it" to you.