Occipital lobe development

John Go at wa.com.au
Tue Nov 3 21:01:34 EST 1998

Erik Broch wrote in message
<01be05c2$06d3f120$LocalHost at AC7748BU120253.ac.com>...
>I've had an argument with a college of mine.
>ability to se small nuances in the grey scale, that we as parents cant se.
>In other words. Can our children have a more advanced occipital lobe than
>we have. And is this alleged development caused by a much higher degree of
>caused by cultural, or sociale factors?

This phenomenon is not unique to vision. Infants can make all human phonemes
at birth but as they acquire a language certain capacities are lost. My
brand of my stereo amplifiers, Eidetic, provides a clue here. It does at
appear that part of the CNS's learning involves making some choices at
specified points of development. Most, if not all, sensory systems are
modulated by afferent fibres from the cortex to sensory organ (in the optic
nerve 10% of all fibres feed back to the ganglions in the retinas). There
have been studies (which I think I can reference if you wish) demonstrating
that people from different visual cultures can be suspectible to varying
types of visual tricks (like those pictures with two faces).

Vision works extremely well (I am a single vision person so trust me on
this!) precisely because that 15% of the brain goes to so much trouble to
discriminate and discard. This is constantly brought to my attention by
various friends, who marvel at my capacity to not see the blindlingly
obvious. It is true, I think I get around in this world because my visual
system has become more selective than others to compensate for the loss of

Fortunately my eidetic amplifiers have not been likewise constrained.The
loss of the visual capacity you mention could be as a result of the visual
system choosing perceptual emphases which have the effect of reducing
sensory input. Our early eidetic sensory apparatus may
have created that wonderful blooming buzzing confusion but if we were to
make any sense of the world at some point we had to reduce the noise; too
much of which still rumbles through this tired old cranium.

I'm not sure one should regard their increased capacity of children to
discriminate grey scales as being 'better'; particularly with Super VGA'sat
a gazillion colours currently being the standard. It may simply reflect a
shift in sensory emphasis.

johnhkm at logicworld.com.au
>Erik Broch

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