Cotton with one palm

The Alpina Non-Fixes Publishing House represents the book of neurobiologist Nikolai Kukushkin “Cotton with one palm. How inanimate nature gave rise to the human mind. ”

Life on Earth is an incomprehensible, ubiquitous, teeming with millions of legs, knots, thorns and teeth of Bacchanalia, in which we exist and from which we come from. For three and a half billion years she did without us, and in the last moments of history from this intricacies of animals, plants, mushrooms and microbes, a person emerges and wonders: who am I and what is the meaning of my human life? In his debut book, the evolutionary neurobiologist Nikolai Kukushkin, step by step, recreates a picture of the world from inanimate matter to the human mind, in order to find in the past of his type the answers to eternal questions.

It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the life of our ancestors for the last Eon was a transformation into worms. “Cotton with one palm” is the history of man and his inner world, which contains all the way from inorganic molecules to the emergence of the language and told as if it are a knightly novel or a mythical epic.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

The right against Leo

The best tool to get acquainted with your own brain, without resorting to the introduction of electrodes or to prohibited chemicals, is a visual effect called “binocular competition”. It is easy to reproduce at home or in the audience. All that is needed for this is a 3D-echo with red and blue lenses and a screen with a red-blue image. At the lectures, I use a picture in which a red woman, looking to the left, is laid down at a blue woman, looking to the right. Multi -colored lenses in glasses filter this image so that each of the eyes receives different pictures. I ask students to put on glasses and take a closer look at the woman: in which direction does she look?

Most people who put on glasses see only one of two pictures - for example, a woman who looks to the left. But if you continue to look at it, then after a few seconds the picture suddenly begins to move and is replaced by another - a woman who looks to the right. After a few seconds, the situation will repeat and the original image will return to the place. Such fluctuations in perception will continue until a person removes points. Two “competing” images never merge into a single whole, but go back and forth between the pictures received by the left and right eye.

This simple experiment illustrates the fundamental property of our perception. Our sensations are not just signals from the senses, but the interpretation of these signals, which we actively choose from many possible ones.

In most cases, our two eyes look at the same thing, unlike the eyes, for example, a horse. This property relates us with owls and predatory animals like cats, but in our case there was, apparently, adaptation to life on trees requiring movement in three dimensions. Due to the close location of the front on the face, our eyes get slightly different images on the retina, but instead of two “flat” images, we see one voluminous. The retina is physically not able to perceive volume, because it itself is flat. But, summarizing the information from two retina, the brain forms a single sensation, including both information from the eyes and more abstract information about the location of the object in space.

Binocular competition is a wedge stuck in this mechanism of comparison and generalization. The principle of any 3D oks is that different images are shown to two eyes. In three -dimensional cinema, these images differ only in the perspective, artificially imitating voluminous vision, so it seems to the brain that it looks not at a flat screen, but at relief objects. With binocular competition, the eyes are presented with images that are completely unacceptable to each other. The brain is trying to do its usual generalization operation with them and develop a single mental object on their basis. He grabs one of the images (say, a woman turned to the left) and decides that this is what he looks at. But this interpretation is compatible with only one of the eyes. As soon as the brain decides that a woman looks to the left, there is a conflict with a second eye, which claims that a woman looks right. After a few seconds, the brain surrenders and tries to accept such a version of events. But as soon as he decides that the woman still looks right, as the first eye begins to contradict this in the same way. The brain cannot choose a single interpretation, because a single interpretation does not exist, and is hung up in the constant change of explanations of what he saw.

Almost any optical illusion is reduced to the conflict between the audience interpretations. There is, for example, a well -known picture in which you can see either a white vase or two black profiles - but not at the same time. This situation is similar to binocular competition, only in this case not two eyes compete with each other, but two different interpretations of the images that both eyes see.

Why such an interpretation system is needed, it becomes clear if you soberly evaluate the capabilities of our eyes. At what angle of view, the image seems clear and clear to you? Most people will say that this angle is at least 90 °, or even all 180 °-because we see something on the periphery of the field of view. In fact, the retinal area, which is able to distinguish objects with maximum resolution, corresponds to the viewing angle of 2-3 ° - this is approximately the nail of the thumb on the outstretched arm. Compared to this tiny area, called a yellow spot, the rest of the retina sees almost nothing: on the edges of the generally a very narrow viewing angle of 20 °, the resolution of vision drops ten times. This resolution is enough to notice that something is happening in the lateral field of view, but not enough to understand what exactly.

How do we see something then? Firstly, we constantly move our eyes: an average of three to four times a second. But one cannot solve the problem with one movement of the eye-try to look through a straw and move it quickly and quickly. More importantly, we, in principle, see not signals from the eyes, but our own fantasies on the topic of these signals. In most cases, signals themselves are needed only to adjust such fantasies, updating the existing idea of ​​the world. All this allows us to constantly live in the “virtual reality” of our own sensations, which is much more understandable than chaotic and unpredictable sensory information.

By the way
Eyes move sharply twitching movements, or sakkada, which usually last from 20 to 200 milliseconds. At this time, the flow of visual information into the brain is turned off and we see nothing. If you were shown a film in which there would be spaces four times a second even at 20 milliseconds, you would not watch it. But vision is subjectively perceived as a continuous video stream. It seems to us that we just look, but in fact, for the most part we imagine. The information supplied to the brain with the eyes is only one of the components of the sensation of vision.

In one experiment, for example, volunteers were asked to fix a look in the center of the screen, after which a picture appeared in their lateral field of view. While people looked at this picture, it was replaced by another. If this is done quickly, then the person does not notice the substitution and thinks that he saw this second picture with lateral vision. If this is repeated many times, then in the future people will look with lateral vision at the first picture and say that they see the second - the one that they are used to seeing after the eye translating. That is, lateral vision is, at least partly, a habit, an illusion of a clear, objective vision where we are actually oriented from memory.

The fact that we actually see very poorly with lateral vision may be difficult to believe. If you, like me, look at such an opportunity skeptical, then most likely we are just people of unique abilities. But there is a simple experiment for verification. Try to fix your eyes on the line of the text and not move your eyes. At the same time, try to switch your attention to the line below. Then another one. And yet. After half a minute, you will feel that in your eyes it seemed as if clouded: only a few words on which your eyes are focused on, and everything else is blurred. In fact, this is how we see everything. Other details of what we see in the lateral field of view is a virtual model of reality made by the brain on the basis of previous experience. It is this virtual model, and not the very surrounding reality, that inhabit our consciousness.