Rethinking the Process of Vision
A New Explanation for Light Interaction with the Retina of the Eye and the Vision Process
This BBC video above "Colorful Notions" from 1985 first summarizes the classical theory of color vision and follows with the ideas of Edwin Land who personally explains and demonstrates his experiments. It can be viewed as an introduction to this work.
This is Sidebar 2. You can edit the content that appears here by visiting your Widgets panel and modifying the current widgets in Sidebar 2. Or, if you want to be a true ninja, you can add your own content to this sidebar by using the appropriate hooks.
Website design and development berchman.com
Get smart with the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes.
Pribram, Land, Holography, Huth
by Gerald Huth on September 7, 2008
I was asked if I know of Karl Pribram’s proposal that consciousness is dependent on holographic structure and is therefore, in some sense, related to the vision process. I have certainly been aware of these ideas for years but felt that they were incomplete in not providing any proposal for a possible mechanism as to how this might actually be effected. I believe that this is the reason why Pribram’s ideas although receiving a great deal of notoriety have languished.
It occurs to me that this situation is similar Edwin Land’s work on color vision where he identified the fundamental nature of this process but, with the paradigm for light interaction available to him in 1955 could go no further in explaining the mechanism involved. I would believe that Pribram’s prescient ideas about holography are in the same vein.
I believe that I provide a mechanism for a holographic content to the vision process in my explanation for light interaction with the retina. This lies in the, to me unassailable, geometric proof that the retina forms the Fourier plane of the optics of the eye….and….. the Fourier equation requires that both light intensity and phase be encoded…and these are the necessary elements for any holographic interpretation of vision.
I had not really thought about a holographic interpretation of vision until chancing upon a reference to the original paper of Gabor first describing the principle of holography. The quote from this reference that caught my attention:
“Gabor also considered only the case where the illuminating wave also serves as a reference wave”.
Axial holography! I had believed from at least a cursory overview of the holographic process and that generation of a hologram required a separate “reference beam”. What struck me in the Gabor paper was that in his initial experimentation he used a portion of the incident beam itself to act as a wave reference in a holographic construction. I have discussed this in a previous Comment that the reader might review.
Might a holographic interpretation of vision be developed using my light interaction explanation? The necessary elements seem to be there.
GCH
9.7.08