Our transit from Waterford to Cork along the coast was very pleasant with lots of sun. Along the way we visited pretty coastal villages and viewed green fingers of headland dipping gently into the ocean.
We stopped for lunch at the delightful coastal village of Cobh where St. Colman’s Cathedral contains the only church carillon in Ireland, which with 49 bells, is one of the largest carillons in the British Isles. Every 15 minutes you get to hear a few of them in action. You’d never be able to tell your Mum you forgot what time it was when you returned home late from playing at your friend’s house.
For the last few days travelling in the car, we’ve been listening to podcast episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage. Today’s podcasts were extremely interesting; “Maths of Love and Sex” and “What is Reality”. From the latter episode I learnt some new information about how the brain works;
- Auditory processing consumes more ‘brainpower’ than visual processing.
- Visual processing is suspended when you move your eyes or blink. This means that your eyes are only feeding data into the visual cortex for about 85% of the time.
- Visual inputs are processed as updates to a model of the world your brain is continually creating. Your eyes are glancing about grabbing ‘images’ which are being added to this model continually.
- Input data from the various sensory subsystems are processed at differing speeds and consequently the brain has to mash these inputs together to produce a synchronised version of reality; think lip-synching. The processing delay of converging these inputs is estimated to be about 500 ms. This means that our ‘conscious’ world is continually half a second behind the ‘real’ world.
This is not the place to describe what was discussed in the “Maths of Love and Sex” episode but suffice to say it was just as illuminating as “What is Reality”. 🙂