Quotes and comments on Morgan's "The Space Between our Ears"

P65-6 – “Motion is a specific sensation from a particular class of neural mechanism, just as colour is a sensation. We cannot divide sensation of motion into separate pictures like the frames of a motion picture, because those sensations were never there to start with. Motion is computed directly from the image, without sensory intermediates."

Idea here is that since there are brain cells in visual cortex which respond to motion (in preferred directions), so we can forget the empiricist ideal of constructing motion from sense-data.

P98-99 – “Generative models are also beginning to explain how we move our muscles. Moving our limbs has much in common with interpreting our retinal images. In both cases the number of possibilities is so vast that we have to simplify them with models. There are roughly 600 muscles in the human body. Even if we assume for simplicity that each muscle can be contracted or relaxed, there are still 2 raised to the power 600 possibilities – more than the number of atoms in the Universe. It does not seem plausible that every possible movement we might wish to make is represented in the brain by a memory of exactly the right signals to be sent to each individual muscle. The alternative is that we in some way represent the desired end state of the movement – an internal model – and have neural networks that we tune by experience to translate these high level models into action. If action involves the comparison between a model and the present state of the body, the distinction between perception and action begins to fade away."

Note also that the teleological models are also tuned through sensorimotor experience e.g. in karate.

P128 – “..we say that the mirror has reversed left and right, but we are mistaken: the reversal has been done by our act of mental rotation”

- similar solution to Nerlich and Martin gardner – the enantiomorph is rotated through 4-dimensional space.

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Other quotes:

Preface, ix: "The prize for the worst poem about science has yet to be awarded... The zoological lines of John Hookham Frere in 1799 have... received a mention:

'The feather'd race with pinions skims the air
Not so the mackerel and still less the bear' "

P19 "Wyld's 1815 'Chart of Civilisations' colours countries from 'I' (very uncivilised) to 'V' (England). Canada gets an unkind II for containing 'cannibals and Frenchmen': it is not clear whether it was the cannibals or the French who raised it above Australia (I)."

P150 "The next section examines the idea that only some areas of the of the brain are involved in our conscious experience. Readers should skip this section if they think that the relationship between philosophy and science is like that between pigeons and statues"