Page 24 - Black Range Naturalist, Vol. 1, No. 2

of creating a perceptual image of the external world.
The amount of information necessary to create even a fuzzy perception of a piece of the world is huge. Even a snake’s small eye sends to its brain the
dual visual system not just with its photoreceptors.
Like cameras, eyes focus light rays from distant objects on a photoresponsive surface, the retina. There the similarity to cameras stops. What the retina sends to
Information from many tens of thousands of photoreceptors with other kinds of sensory information and memory as well. It is not surprising that data-reducing abstraction starts early on. A rattlesnake brain does even more: it integrates its primary light-based visual system with the entirely different infra-red “visual” system. Infra-red quanta have longer wavelengths and are too weak for visual pigments to detect. How the rattlesnake puts all of this together is unknown. In any event, a Diamondback “sees“ with a
the brain occurs after intense processing of the photo-images and is quite different from the simple image reproduction that a camera provides. The processing involves abstraction of features (lines, etc.) and the perception of objects. The rattler in the creek bed needs to know what are the dangers or opportunities in our encounter; the faster the better, so prior experience is incorporated early in the perception process. At what point the infra red, heat information is
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