Catmachine

There is no-one to blame. The whole feeling of being put upon by fate, the weather or other so-called acts of God comes not from reality but from the human brain's almost infinite capacity for Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is how life makes sense of the universe. In the case of human beings the process has become so baroque and complex that it's unsurprising when it starts to throw out anomalies. We may think we see what is in front of us but that is very far from the truth. Without the high intensity interpretation and pattern matching going on in the visual cortex of the brain, the field of view is a chaotic mess of shape and shade. Even something as simple as identifying colour is tied up with image identification and processing. As the recent furore about a certain dress and - more interestingly - the very different colour palette perceived by the Himba tribe of Namibia prove, it seems that the ability to distinguish between shades of colour is linked to...

Thugg the Caveman and some of the other males from his tribe made their way across the tundra of Ice Age West Midlands.  It had been a hard winter and numbers had decreased significantly. Some had been lost to the cold, some to hunger and still others to the saber-toothed tigers that continued to plague this branch of infant humanity. It was a risky business, this hunter-gathering. If you didn't pay attention constantly it could spell doom for both you and your chances of passing on the genes for not paying attention constantly. Thugg clipped Foot-Watcher around the ear and by means of a series of complex grunts and gestures indicated to him that whilst staring at his own feet might one day become the de rigueur pose for indie musicians many millennia hence, right here and now it was about as much use as a chocolate teapot.  Foot-Watcher looked perplexed - as well he might seeing as neither chocolate nor teapots would be invented...

I'm going to go on about The Question Machine (QM) again today. I've been theorising about and blaming it for any number of things over the past couple of months. For anyone reading this for the first time, the QM is my way of describing the way the brain builds up a picture of the world around it, starting from first principles ( is that a straight line? yes ) and after twenty million questions in a short space of time arriving at a correct description of what's being presented to it. Previously I've been interested in what happens when the QM's sense of discrimination is turned down or off (resulting in dreams or hallucinations) but here I'm going to poke it with a stick whilst it's still on full power. There is a phenomenon I've noticed myself but which I've never seen specifically described (and why should it, it only occurs in specialised circumstances). I used to hitch-hike around the country a lot when I was younger, principally to go and se...