![Multistable perception is what happens when you receive ambiguous sensory stimuli—the Necker cube and the Rubin face-vase illusion being two of the simplest examples—and the brain spontaneously alternates between two or more interpretations. This is interesting to scientists because it provides a way of distinguishing neural activity related to conscious perception with activity related to sensory stimulation. Simplified, it’s a way of distinguishing between “low-level” activity like basic visual processing and higher-level cognition, such as conscious interpretation and ultimately, building conscious models of the world. Recent research (pdf) suggests that…multistable perception [is] the product of continuous interactions between ‘low- level’ (sensory) and ‘high-level’ (frontal and parietal) brain regions. There is now unequivocal evidence that fluctuations in neuronal population activity at both anatomically early and later stages of visual processing are strongly correlated with perception.
It also hints at the degree to which our conscious experience of the world is a constructive activity—the mental image of a lazy “Ego” that sits on a couch inside the brain passively receiving perceptions from outside is replaced with one in which the higher-level brain does not simply passively receive a model of the world from the senses, but takes an active role in shaping it. From the aforementioned overview:
Natural visual scenes contain many ambiguities and conflicts that usually go unnoticed because the brain effectively disambiguates the information received. In such a framework, multi-stable perception can be conceived of as a frequent re- evaluation of the current interpretation of the sensory input, which also occurs during normal vision but becomes particularly evident when ambiguities are maximised.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llt7mjqWC11qzo4mso1_500.png)
Multistable perception is what happens when you receive ambiguous sensory stimuli—the Necker cube and the Rubin face-vase illusion being two of the simplest examples—and the brain spontaneously alternates between two or more interpretations. This is interesting to scientists because it provides a way of distinguishing neural activity related to conscious perception with activity related to sensory stimulation. Simplified, it’s a way of distinguishing between “low-level” activity like basic visual processing and higher-level cognition, such as conscious interpretation and ultimately, building conscious models of the world. Recent research (pdf) suggests that…
multistable perception [is] the product of continuous interactions between ‘low- level’ (sensory) and ‘high-level’ (frontal and parietal) brain regions. There is now unequivocal evidence that fluctuations in neuronal population activity at both anatomically early and later stages of visual processing are strongly correlated with perception.
It also hints at the degree to which our conscious experience of the world is a constructive activity—the mental image of a lazy “Ego” that sits on a couch inside the brain passively receiving perceptions from outside is replaced with one in which the higher-level brain does not simply passively receive a model of the world from the senses, but takes an active role in shaping it. From the aforementioned overview:
Natural visual scenes contain many ambiguities and conflicts that usually go unnoticed because the brain effectively disambiguates the information received. In such a framework, multi-stable perception can be conceived of as a frequent re- evaluation of the current interpretation of the sensory input, which also occurs during normal vision but becomes particularly evident when ambiguities are maximised.
dailymeh posted this on May 26, 2011
