Re: [Phys-l] inversion goggles

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Of course the doctor is spouting nonsense.  The retina sends a series of
signals to the brain, and there is no inherent correlation between right
side up and upside down.  The baby learns to decode these signals over time
and eventually associates them with right side up.  I suspect that the nerve
fibers actually get somewhat twisted and intertwined so the signals going
the brain are not necessarily in the same order spatially when they arrive.
But the brain sorts them out into a connected picture.

Why should the inverted image on our retina inherently be seen upside down?
That idea is projecting our paradigms onto how the vision system works.
After all a TV camera gets the image up side down, so why don't we see an
upside down picture on our TV?

Right side up and upside down are interpretations of our brain.  When nerves
are cut in an accidental amputation and put back together they can mend and
the person can get back some feeling and some motor skills.  But they don't
necessarily connect back the same way, so your brain has to figure out the
signals and disentanble them.  It does this over time.

Look at the ear.  The cochlea is a curled up organ with sensative hairs, but
we don't percieve this when we hear.

I wonder where the eye doctor got this idea, as it is obviously ridiculous.
MDs are just as prone to stupid ideas about science as a lot of the general
public.  The head of the TX board of education was a dentist who pushed
creationism and ID to the fellow board members.  Actually they are not
trained in science, but rather they are more akin to technicians as users of
scientific results.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> From: Anthony Lapinski <Anthony_Lapinski@pds.org>
> Sent: Thu, May 12, 2011 12:13:57 PM
>
> > P.S. I'm still trying  to figure out how our brain flips 
> inverted images on
> > our retina so we see the  world as upright. My eye doctor 
> once told me that
> > this is initially not true  for newborns -- that they 
> literally see the
> > world inverted! Wow!