The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization

7. Images in the Head

In order to understand perception, you need first to get rid of the notion that the image at the back of your eye simply gets “relayed” back to your brain to be displayed on a screen. Instead, you must understand that as soon as the rays of light are converted into neural impulses at the back of your eye, it no longer makes sense to think of the visual information as being an image. We must think, instead, of symbolic descriptions that represent the scenes and objects that had been in the image.

—V.S. Ramachandran, from The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human

Evolution influences us to be attracted to what increases our chances of survival and reproduction and to be repelled by what harms ...