Eli5: the lens of your eye flips the image of what is happening in front of you and displays it on your retina, then your brain “flips” it again for you to perceive. What is the brain doing for that second flip?

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Eli5: the lens of your eye flips the image of what is happening in front of you and displays it on your retina, then your brain “flips” it again for you to perceive. What is the brain doing for that second flip?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Your brain isn’t doing anything. It simply detects light and movement from your retina that’s wired to specific parts of your brain. A lot of it is the the brain “learns to see” in your very early months. The brain learns which movements and locations of light mean what things. Animals that have their eyes covered for a few weeks after birth often end up effectively blind because the part of the brain that should process the eye never “learned” by experience to process vision. [Horrible experiment here…](https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/jn.1965.28.6.1029)

A simple analogy to the wiring part of this is to rotate a calculator 180 degrees on your desk. The buttons and display are visible, but upside down. Now do math. The results are still correct. Even though the inputs to the calculator are “upside down”, the wiring is such that it knows which signal came from which button and it’s still able to produce a correct result.

As to the learning part. Imagine teaching a kid a game with abstract shapes. They will quickly learn which shapes mean which things. Now take another kid (who has never heard of the game) and teach them the same game, but the shapes are rotated 180 degrees. They will learn the game just as quickly.

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