Researchers of Cognitive Science have begun to develop a technique to turn our eyes and visual system into a programmable computer. His findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Perception. Harnessing the computing power of our visual system requires visually representing a computer program in such a way that when an individual views the representation, the visual system naturally carries out the computation and generates a perception. Ideally, we would be able to glance at a complex visual stimulus (the software program), and our visual system (the hardware) would automatically and effortlessly generate a perception, which would inform us of the output of the computation.
Researchers used simple drawings of unambiguous boxes as inputs for his visually represented digital circuits. The positioning and shading of each box indicates which direction the image is tilted. They also created visual representations of the logic gates NOT, which flips a circuit's state from 0 to 1 or vice versa; OR, which outputs 1 if one or both inputs are 1; and AND, which outputs 1 only if both inputs are 1. By perceptually walking through the proposed visual representation of a digital circuit, from the inputs downward to the output, our visual system will naturally carry out the computation so that the "output" of the circuit is the way we perceive the final box to tilt, and thus a one or zero.
More information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080723134434.htm
More information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080723134434.htm