Finished Chapter 4, and started Chapter 5

• Author gave more scientific explanations on the behaviour of the Zombie brain
• Each eye has 2 channel, the left side is connected to the right brain and the right side is connected to the left brain
  • These are reponsible for seeing things and sending it to brain cells
  • if the right side of the brain which processes images gets damaged then it can create a blindspot in the left side of the eye
• We have 2 kinds of vision
  • One is instantaneous which just shows the “HOW”, like reacting to something, or flicking eyes as something happens, spatial awareness in general
  • Then is the WHAT which is slower, and is involved in understanding the incident in more details, what caused that, what was it, what was the shape, what was the color
    • So basically brain ha around 30 centers where different kindof computation happens
      • One is responsible for colors called V4
      • One is responsible for seeing things in motion called (MT — Middle Temporal)
        • Losing this, can make people lose track of motions in eyesight, and will see still frames
      • And most of them are still under research, maybe they are finding more monkeys to experiment with
  • So the zombie brain can be explained in the case when the WHAT side of brain stops functioning
    • ie the patient cant recognize shapes or colors of things
    • but the HOW side of thing is still functional, so they can act and react on things which happens ie grabbing the pencil correctly. It is still kindof a wonderful how is brain able to do all this. They call it “blindsight” — an oxymoron
  • The WHAT side is called the new path it connects to temporal lobe, and the HOW side is called the old path it connects to parietal lobes
  • Also the HOW part of brain is not influenced by illusions, author gave a good example of a circle surrounded with smaller circles and another one with larger circles
    • Our brain think the middle circle is smaller about ~30% when it is surrounded by larger circles, but in reality it is same size — thats the WHAT part of brain getting fooled
• Also I think, both these parts lie under system 1 of thinking
  • Like i can say, “Wait? is that a shadow” — so my system 1 gave a result, next system 2 takes over to anaylse it
  • But for system 1 to give the result, the HOW part saw there is something in proximity, and WHAT part saw it is dark and flat, and it is same size as the subject, so it is a shadow. Quite fascinating
• In Chapter 5, author talks about a new type of disorder or syndrome called Charles Bonnet Syndrome
  • Here people are blind but they can see vibrant things or strange objects, and for them it feels more real than reality