Blackwell Reference Online

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Our brains process visual data in segregated, specialized cortical areas. As is commonly remarked, the brain processes the what and the where of its environment in separate, distal locations. Indeed, regarding the what information that the brain computes, it responds to edges, colors, and movements using different neuronal pathways. Moreover, so far as we can tell, there are no true association areas in our cortices. There are no convergence zones where information is pooled and united; there are no central neural areas dedicated to information exchange. Still, the visual features that we extract separately have to come together in some way, since our experiences are of these features united together into a single unit. The binding problem is explaining how our brains do that, given the serial, distributed nature of our visual processing. How do our minds know to join the perception of a shape with the perception of its color to give us the single, unified experience of a colored object? This problem has a venerable history in philosophy, first appearing in its modern guise in David Hume, as he, following John Locke, speculated on the rules that our minds must follow in uniting simple impressions into more complex ideas. He recognized that the rules of association alone could not be enough: incoming stimuli are always changing, yet we manage to experience ideas as constant ... log in or subscribe to read full text