When what you see doesn’t make sense, your brain does something remarkable

Sometimes what we see does not immediately make sense. A shadow can briefly resemble a face, or one object can momentarily be mistaken for another. New research suggests that the brain may resolve these visual conflicts by allowing different regions to compare their interpretations until a more consistent picture emerges.

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience , Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cynthia R. Stebbins Fellow Mitra Javadzadeh and collaborators at the University of Cambridge and University College London examined how two neighboring regions of the visual cortex interact. They found that when activity in the two regions matched, the shared pattern persisted. When the regions produced conflicting patterns, however, the disagreement faded within a fraction of a second.

The findings offer a possible explanation for how the brain combines information from specialized regions into a single, coherent perception.

How Specialized Brain Regions Work Together