First of all I would like to say that i find the recent topics in class absolutely fascianting. I have never had an opportunity to investigate the anatomy of the eye and the question of seeing before, so the material behind the last classes is new and incredibly informative to me.
However there are a few associations/questions I have with these topics. One is with the way we percive reality. I remeber that in my high-school we were required to take geometry class. In those classes it was often necessary to know exactly what the picture of something looks like in order to solve the problem correctly. my teacher often was impressed with the ability of some students to do so. Apperantly enough, some people have really big problems trying to visualize pictures in several dimensions or even just parallel planes. Why is that? Is that something to do with the visual systems that we have discussed in class? I wonder about that, even though somehow it seems to me that the processes involved in seeing should not really be involved in whether you can picture something, or how you see it. In general the perception of reality is a quite puzzling thing. Why for example can some people see the pictures behind the 3-D images which are found in any bookstore these days? I definitely have problems doing that. Do you know what is involved in trying to see those pictures in terms of nervous system. It seems to me that you would only be able to see the picture if you try not to be involved in the process yourself and let the brain do all the work. IS that so?
Another problem had to do with colorblindess. I remember talking to a person who was colorblind. She said that she was only able to see in color when she was wearing esspecially desighned glasses, in which one half of the glass was colored red and the other one was clear. For some reason i can't find an explanation for this in terms of rods and cones. Can you help?
I was also thinking about other sensory systems that we are equipped with. Is sound similar to the visual system? I hope we get a chance to talk about that.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that it seems that we get better in seeing something with practice. Why is that?
Pleased/gratified by your interest in what we've been talking about in class, and challenged by your questions. Different people DO have different abilities to see and visualize things, as you suspect. I suspect not many of those are explainable in terms of the kinds of processing we were talking about in class, but at least some are. I share your difficulty, for example, in seeing the pictures in currently popular 3-d images (many people do), and we'll talk a bit in class about why that is so. No, I can't come up at the moment with a possible explanation for the two colored glasses (the red is likely to block color input from one eye pretty much, so there may be an eye dominance effect going on). Yeah, I wish we had time to talk about sound too. It shows some very similar phenomena (as do all sensory systems). Maybe another course. The getting better with time? Easy answer: something changes in the nervous system. The harder question: where/what/how? Probably lots of different answers (as will talk about a little later in course) PG