context is everything

The patterns of light that fall to your eyes are meaningless.

(...)
When the brain looks out to the world, it doesn't see the absolute of things. It sees relationships and uses relationships to build context.

R. Beau Lotto, lead author on a study out of the University College of London, that “suggests all visual distinctions aren't hardwired but rather represent the statistical accumulation of an individual's earlier experience.”

According Dale Purves, director of Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, who was cited in the brief National Geographic write up on the study, Lotto’s findings represent a “radical departure from the approach to vision taken in the last 50 years.”

Oh yeah -- and they tricked robot brains with optical illusions to figure it out »