Grids into Maps!

I see I am doing a poor job of communicating the contents of maps/areas. You are describing things as objects in some map/area as if they were present as discrete objects distributed over the area like an overhead picture of the scene in a photograph. It just does not work that way at all.

The eye is an approachable path as we can form some mental models of how what we see is represented in cortex. The other senses work the same way but we will stick with the eye here. Even a quick overview shows that the idea of a wall in the cortex simply does not make sense. What we “look at” to form the concept of a wall is a sequence of fixations on the features of the world. I offer this bit about “just” looking at a face:

Note that the cortex is getting the images from each fixation as a sequences, each stacked one on the next. The fixations that is part of a wall or door a occupy the exact same space in cortex. What would a wave bounce off of?

It’s harder than that as the dynamics of a traveling wave are not synchronized to what parts the eye is pointing at - the door or the table in the way or … whatever.

The assemblage of features from different fixations are assembled into objects in the temporal lobe but these cortical waves that drive processing happen over the entire cortex - not just the bits where features turn into object and relationships between objects.

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