Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Creation Moment 5/4/2022 - Visual Cortex Library

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous.. Psalm 139:14
 
"Researchers at Max Planck, Rockefeller, and Duke Universities
examined the connections in brain tissue from the visual cortex, the first stop for information coming in from the retina.

A news item from Max Planck, “No cable spaghetti in the brain,” describes the cabling nightmare:
 "Nerve cells in the human brain are densely interconnected and form a seemingly impenetrable meshworkA cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains several kilometers of wires. A fraction of this wiring might be governed by random mechanisms, because random networks could at least theoretically process information very well. Let us consider the visual system: In the retinaseveral million nerve cells provide information for more than 100 Million cells in the visual cortex. The visual cortex is one of the first regions of the brain to process visual information. In this brain area, various features as spatial orientation, color and size of visual stimuli are processed and represented." 
 
But they did not find randomness. They found a well-organized structure like a library
"The way information is sent may be comparable to a library, in which books can easier found if they are sorted not only alphabetically by title, but also by genre and by author. In a library, books are spread to different shelves, but typically not randomly. Similarly, various facets of visual perception are represented separately in the visual cortex."
Most neurons in the visual cortex behave similarly to their neighbors. Exceptions are “pinwheels” — singular points “around which the preferred orientations of the cells are arranged as the winglets of a pinwheel.” They looked to see if the number and orientation of these pinwheels was random. It was not; the observations do not fit the random hypothesis.

Q: How Would This Evolve by a Darwinian Process?
The visual cortex does not “see” the outside world. If you were a neuron, operating in the dark inside brain tissue, you would only sense chemical signals coming and going. 
Q: How would neurons ever “know” how to “self-organize” in such a way that their representations of incoming signals would form a 576 megapixel motion picture that corresponds to the external world? 
No mutation or series of mutations would lead to a 100-million-volume sorted library." EN&V