[apl]

This represents the absolute worst kind of science journalism, completely devoid of context and domain knowledge. Virtually every definitive statement in here is wrong. Their explanation of spiking alone is a complete disaster.

Out of all the modalities, vision is easily the one we know the most about. And we do so at a fairly deep level. The discussed work seems fine but it's not the groundbreaking insight it's made out to be. Great PR work from the involved scientists (or their enterprising university marketing department).

[asimpletune]

I don’t know a lot about this subject. Can you elaborate?

[briga]

Cognitive scientists have been studying the computational foundations of vision in depth since at least the 1980s (see David Marr's 1982 book Vision), and AI scientists have been using neural networks for computer vision tasks for at least as long. So yeah, I'm no expert, but this probably isn't the ground-breaking work the article makes it out to be.

[gus_massa]

I'm not an expert, but is this paragraph correct?

> Not only are LGN cells scarce — they can’t do much either. LGN cells send a pulse to the visual cortex when they detect a change from dark to light, or vice versa, in their tiny section of the visual field. And that’s all.

[I think the "scarcity" is real, but some areas have better coverage than other. But I really don't remember anything similar to the other part of the model.]

[floki999]

Agree - very disappointing. I studied human and machine vision in grad school 20 years ago and fail to see the breakthrough hinted at by the title of the article.

[floki999]

This is one of those magazines that comes in this thisck premium paper - perhaps to give a sense of important content where there is little.