Teias Matemáticas : Comunicações

A number of anthropologists have suggested that many of the simple patterns seen in ancient and recent cave paintings are the work of Shamans in a variety of trance-like states. Analogies are made between cave art and patterns reported during visual disturbances such as honeycombs, whirling spokes, tunnels, and colored mosaics. These patterns shed light into the intrinsic structure of visual cortex - that part of the brain responsible for the early processing of visual stimuli. The organization of visual cortex has many symmetries including spatial translation invariance and organization along cells with different orientation preference. One can exploit these symmetries and use them to show how increased excitation of neural networks spontaneously leads to the above mentioned patterns.