This series points to the relationships between the dimensionality of perception and human consciousness with particular attention paid to memory formation.
When light bounces off an object and travels to the eye it contacts the cornea. From the cornea light passes through the iris, then through the lens where light is focused onto the fovea of the retina. The fovea has the highest visual acuity and it computes different frequencies of light.
Visual information leaves the eye and travels down the optic nerve and crosses at the optic chiasm. After the optic chiasm the optic nerve comes in contact with the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, which is sent to the primary visual cortex. Eyes collect and compute data but we don’t see with our eyes we only when visual information enters the primary visual cortex.
From the visual cortex, information transfers in two general directions. One direction is important for processing spatial information while the other computes object identity. Spatial and object information is sent to and combined in the hippocampus. The hippocampus takes the information about space and associates the representation of objects to time, which creates the base for autobiographical memory formation.
Four dimensional space-time makes up the universe. Human perception is limited to three dimensions. The surface of an image is a two dimensional representation of space, its relationship to objects, at a particular moment in time, the latter is unidimensional. Images thread human perception from an unimaginable fourth dimension to an ephemeral one-dimension.