Book Sharing part 2

Book title: Consciousness and the brain

Continued

The study of conscious access was made possible through experiments like troxler fading and image rivalry.

In troxler fading, you focus on a central spot like a cross which is surrounded by gray spots as what the author presented in the book. As you focus for some time, the gray spots will start to fade awake from your sight.

The author proposes that this was due tohow our eyes evolved with blood vessels running in front of our eye receptors.

I am not sure if I understand what the authoring is explaining correctly.

He said it was due to the blood vessels in front of the receptors, that the brain will start to interpret motionless object as invisible and only detects objects when there is motion, so as we will not constantly bug by the blood vessels in front of our retina.

Image rivalry is the presentation of two distinct images to each of the eyes. The effect will be alternating images of the two pictures presented to each of the eyes.

In the initial stage of visual processing, the images are encoded equally, when it was in deeper areas of processing, the rate of neuron firing changes.

The author went on to point out that image rivalry is dependent on whether attention is given to the pictures.

In an experiment, frequency tags given to the two images (image flickering rate) shows that when image rilvary occurs, the neuron firing rates, which correspond to the image frequency tags
, alternate between the two frequencies when attention is given.