Also curious how it flips what we see and how it knows to do that, or why it’s possible to see anything upside-down at all.
In: Biology
It doesn’t. It’s a misunderstanding of the situation, really.
Because our eyes use a lens to focus incoming light into a clear image, the image that hits our retina is “upside-down”, exactly like what happens in a camera or telescope.
The misunderstanding is this idea that our brain takes this crazy upside-down image and works its magic to flip the image correctly.
It doesn’t need to. Simply enough, the top part of our retina is just treated as the bottom of the visual field. It’s connected to the part of the visual cortex that expects the bottom of the image. It’s all handled by the “wiring”. No transformation is needed.
It’s just like a camera sensor. The top of the image just happens to be physically located on the bottom part of the sensor. There’s no reason to make the top of the sensor the top of the image and then require a microprocessor to flip it around. (Although we *can* do that and in fact this is very common with phones because we can hold them in an orientation, and redefining the top or bottom is convenient.)
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