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From: petehip@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Peter Hipwell)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <D2vF1K.4G4@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <D1yB6E.1HA@spss.com> <3eog4a$ne2@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> <D29wAM.A37@festival.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 18:22:30 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <D29wAM.A37@festival.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:

>
>I have twice seen tantalising edited fragments from a TV program which
>seemed to be suggesting that we could learn to see a 4-D world. I once
>saw it on BBC TV, and once in an exhibition on 4-D art. It seems (if
>my interpretation of the fragments is correct) that someone built a
>4-D geometric modeller which presented on screen 2-D perspective
>projections projections of a 4-D world. This world was populated with
>a variety of 4-D shapes, one of them being a tesseract (to my surprise
>I can recognise a revolving tesseract though I can't "see" it). The
>shapes were shown as wire frames. The user could use joysticks or
>knobs or something to select movement in this world, i.e., could
>wander about in it in much the same way as users can wander about
>inside 3-D architectural models. A few weeks hard work at most for an
>expert with the right and very familiar tools to hand.
>
>Of course since this is a 4-D world, what seems to be happening is
>that one is viewing complex and constantly distorting and folding 3-D
>shapes. The claim was that after being exposed to this system for a
>few hours, a number of people would suddenly cry out "I can see it! I
>can see the shapes!", having indeed learned how to see 4-D shapes by
>"walking" among them.
>
>My guess is that this was not done properly as a cog sci experiment,
>but simply for fun by someone with the time, skills, and equipment,
>and that some amateurishly shot video of it has circulated in computer
>gee whiz circles. In each case what I saw was a fragment of a TV
>program which included, just as a bit of trivial gee-whizzery, a
>fragment of another program made about the 4-D modeller.
>
>If my interpretation of what I saw is true, this is very interesting.
>
>Does anybody know any more about this?
>-- 

I haven't seen this particular experiment. However, I do remember
reading about methods of 4D visualization in Rudy Rucker's book "The
Fourth Dimension". There was a nineteenth (?) century approach by
someone named Hinton, using stacked cubes with different colour
sides. I believe the basic idea was to be able to visualize the
colours you'd see at various points and gradually develop some kind of
"internalized 3D retina". This would require an excruciating amount of
concentration and effort, I would imagine. But my memory of this
passage may be grossly inaccurate. 

The book is a great romp of a read, though.

Cheers, 

Pete.
