The Human Holographic Visual System Introduction

As this is an introduction to this book, allow me to introduce you to a bodily function of ours that has been misunderstood, misrepresented, unknown, or kept secret from you and all of humankind ever since humans have existed on Earth. This bodily function is your eyesight. Your eyesight as part of the visual system has toiled away from the time you were born to the present, barring injury or disease, and it toils away daily from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night. Yet, your visual system never gives up its secrets even as we use it every day all the time. In the following chapters, you will meet your holographic visual system.

In this book, the information and discussions about the visual system and its subsystems are presented from the perspective of a new theoretical framework called the holographic theoretical framework. The information and discussions of each of the subsystems of the visual system, such as the eyes, retinas, lateral geniculate nuclei, and the visual cortex, are presented from the holographic theoretical framework perspective and outlined in manner to show how your visual system actually functions.

One thing to keep in mind, the visual system use light waves from the immediate surrounding environment to function successfully. The speed of light is well known, lightning speed, and the size of the light waves are at the nanoscale. So, the visual system functions extremely fast and at the nanoscale. By design, all the structures of the sub-systems of the visual system have their components and sub-components built to function at the nanoscale. Humans cannot see nanoscale structures with their eyes and must use special equipment to see them. Also, you may have already heard of light waves in the brain which are usually are called "ultra weak biophotons."

The information and discussions in the book allow you to understand nature's ingenuous designs and the complexity of each subsystem and how each subsystem manipulates the flow of light waves from the moment they enter the eyes until they are reassembled in the visual cortex.

The Current Standard Theoretical Framework

The current standard theoretical framework uses the simple analogy of the eyes as cameras taking two-dimensional upside down images. Then those images are encoded into nerve or electrical impulses and sent to the brain. The current standard theoretical framework has dominated the study of vision. As the research literature shows, researchers and scientists have accomplished a great deal of good research about the eyes, vision, visual system, and perception under this theoretical framework.

However, the current standard theoretical framework leaves too many unresolved long-standing hard problems, unanswered questions, and other stubborn issues, even after decades of research on these problems. A short list of examples of these hard problems are the correspondence problem, the inverse optics problem, the design of the retina problem, the cortical columns problems in the visual cortex, the purpose of micro-saccades, and much more. Below are further descriptions of these unsolved long-standing hard problems:

Correspondence Problem: The correspondence problem refers to ascertaining which parts of one image in one eye correspond to which parts of another image in the other eye, especially in binocular disparity.1 With the input of electrical impulses, how does the brain determine what is coming from shapes, surfaces, corners, edges, contours, or parts in images? What comes from what, the objects or the background? If it is from an object, is it the same object or a different object? It is difficult to determine shapes, surfaces, corners, edges, contours, or parts of objects in images that are two-dimensional flat surfaces.

Inverse Optics Problem: According to current thinking, the photoreceptors in the retina capture the light of the retinal images and convert the energy of the light into nerve or electrical impulses that are sent to the brain. But researchers have found that the retinal images are ambiguous and uncertain and appear not to contain the information to make sense of those images.2 Researchers have yet to ascertain how the visual system converts a three-dimensional perspective into two-dimensional retinal images and then back into a three-dimensional perspective in the brain with the nerve or electrical impulses produced in the retina.

Design of Retina: After entering the eye, the light must travel through eight layers in the retina before getting to the ninth layer where the photoreceptors are located.3 The location of the photoreceptors has been questioned by many researchers because they are so far inside the retina. Some scientists have even stated the retina is a bad design and/or is flawed.4,5,6

Cortical Columns: Scientists have long puzzled on why some neuron cells in the visual cortex are organized in structures that are shaped like columns which are called cortical columns.7 Some researchers think of cortical columns as the basic fundamental processing units of the cerebral cortex.8 Does the shape have anything to do with the function of cortical columns?9

Micro-Saccades: The eye movements of micro-saccades are small, jerk-like, and involuntary, which happens during prolonged eye fixation. In the 1950's and 1960's, researchers were trying to figure out the cause of the micro-saccades.10 During their experiments, the researchers manipulated their subjects to prolonged fixation of the subjects' eyes. What they discovered was that every time researchers prolonged the fixation of the subjects' eyes; the subjects would lose the image on which they were fixating. It would just fade away. Nobody has been able to adequately explain this mystery. Again, the underlining question here is: what is the function or purpose of the micro-saccades?

The list of unsolved long-standing 'hard problems' is an indication the current theoretical framework has reached its limit and is unable to account for these stubborn unresolved problems, unanswered questions, and other related issues. As a result, other theoretical frameworks have been proposed, but with no better results. The current standard theoretical framework works from simple analogies with a simple rational approach. But these assumptions and premises are incorrect because your eyes are not like cameras, and they send more than electrical impulses to the brain. There is a fundamental need in vision science for a better theoretical framework for the visual system that can account for and explain many of the current unresolved long-standing 'hard problems.'

The Good News

Your eyes and visual system are more complicated than the descriptions provided by the current standard theoretical framework. The good news is that with the use of the holographic theoretical framework, the unresolved long-standing 'hard problems' and unanswered questions, which are present under the current theoretical framework, are resolved and answered. Plus, when you read this book, you will discover how ingeniously complicated your eyes and visual system really are.

The Correspondence Problem: In the following chapters, you can read how the visual system resolves this problem. In chapter 8, you will read about how the visual system uses the horopter process in the eyes, the crossover process in the optic chiasm, and the image disparity process in the lateral geniculate nuclei to produce image disparity and binocular disparity in all visual images. Plus, the visual system uses retinotopic maps that are produced in the retina that anchor snapshots of the field of vision and are maintained throughout the visual system by a network of hardwired neurons that provide the location of everything in the field of vision.

The Inverse Optics Problem: In chapter four, you can read how the visual system resolves this problem. The visual system does not produce sharp images in the retina. It produces snapshots of mosaics of interference patterns in the retina from the incoming light of the immediate surrounding environment. In chapter eight, you can read how the visual system uses the eyes, the optic chiasm and lateral geniculate nuclei to produce three-dimensional interference patterns. In chapter nine, you can read how the three-dimensional interference patterns produced in the lateral geniculate nuclei are assembled in the cortical columns of the primary visual cortex to produce interactive, vivid, true color, moving and dynamic three-dimensional images in real time.

Design of the Retina: In chapter four, you can read how the visual system uses the layers of the retina as a transmissive diffraction grating device to produce interference patterns in various colors, especially in red, green, and blue so that dedicated photoreceptors can pick up red, green, or blue interference patterns. In chapter seven, you can read how the visual system synchronizes interference patterns from the partitioned retinas to produce snapshots of mosaics of interference patterns in red, green, and blue colors and transmits them to the lateral geniculate nuclei.

Purpose of the Micro-Saccades: In chapter eight, you can read about the real function of the optic chiasm and the micro-saccades. You can read how the visual system uses the optic chiasm, the lateral geniculate nucleus and the micro-saccades to produce image disparity between...