About Home
Fellows
Events Home
New Events
Events Venue
Lectures
Seminars
Publications Home
New Publications
Books
Monograph Archive
text only version   |   a A A   | 
Search this site: (powered by Google)
ICR Masthead

Events

Lectures

lectures > lectures spring 2003

Maps, Space and the Brain

Speaker: Michael Morgan
17 May 2003

Forming an image is not the same as being able to analyse it. Cameras and telescopes form images, but they do not understand them. To get a camera to read a car number plate or a face it has to be connected to a computer, which converts the light levels into numbers in its memory. Inside the computer itself there is no need for an image. The brain is widely believed to be a kind of computer, yet it represents the image in a series of maps, where different locations correspond to different points in space. The first of these maps was discovered because small areas of damage to the back of the head can produce small areas of blindness in the visual field.

Why does the brain use maps? One reason is that it is relatively simple to connect these input maps to motor maps, for the guidance of action. Another is that most of the important information in images is to be found in the relation between neighbouring points. The brain uses this fact about images to reduce the number of long-distance nerve connections which would otherwise fill our brain with fat. The conventional computer is a poor model for the brain. To get a better model we have to go back in history to analogue computers, such as those used in Naval Gunnery.

Michael Morgan studied Natural Sciences in the University of Cambridge in the early '60s, specialising in Experimental Psychology. He subsequently held Chairs in Psychology at Durham and UCL and was Darwin Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He is now at the Applied Vision Research Centre in City University, carrying out research on Visual Perception.

http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~morgan/