Gestalt psychologists have proposed many ways in which items are concatenated within a single block of time so that perceptual elements can be combined into complete objects as defined in space (Kohler 1929; see Mollard, Roelfsema et al. 2024 for a modern view). Schiller and Carvey (2006) have demonstrated that perceptual grouping is abolished once the items within a group deviate beyond some size threshold. In this case, individual items may be grouped according to their common size as specified by the spatial resolution of visuotopic maps of V1 through V5, as defined by the retino-cortical magnification factor (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024). Here, it is assumed that the neurophysiology of the brain (i.e., the retino-cortical magnification factor) imposes limits on perception.
We know that consciousness occurs in a stream of concatenated items linked over both space and time (James 1890; Dwarakanath, Logothetis et al. 2023; Sacks 1976, 2012). The linkage across space is facilitated by the sensory topographic maps before being consolidated into a complete form (with context) in the association areas of neocortex (Amita, Kunimatsu et al. 2024; Kimura 1993; Lu and Golomb 2023; Penfield and Roberts 1966; Ojemann 1991; Schiller and Tehovnik 2015). A percept that requires the linkage of events over time is visual motion perception (Schiller and Tehovnik 2015). The neurophysiology of motion perception as conceptualized by Reichardt and Macginitie (1962) provides us with a clue of how different frames of consciousness might be concatenated (see Fig. 1). That the neocortex is inundated with GABAergic circuits is well-established (see Fig. 2). Once a stream of consciousness is consolidated, as for example the memorization of a lecture, the retrieval of the lecture is done such that a sting of activity is executed via the neocortex and cerebellum whose order and direction of activity are mediated through the disinhibition of GABAergic circuits. The perception of motion entails an object moving externally in one direction over time to be registered by neocortical neurons with the same direction tuning; the representation of frames of consciousness, however, requires an internal serialization of neural pools whose order is defined by GABAergic disinhibition during memory consolidation. The retrieval of this information necessitates a replay of the consolidation process (as has been found to occur for the hippocampus during memory consolidation, Wilson and McNaughton 1994). The foregoing supposition will need to be verified empirically for the neocortex and cerebellum.
Figure 1: A neural model for the creation of direction selectivity as conceptualized by Reichardt and Macginitie (1962). Inhibitory connections are added to the circuit (shown in black) such that only one direction of motion activates the neurons. This model has been verified neurophysiologically using GABAergic agents. For details see pp. 194-195 of Schiller and Tehovnik (2015). Illustration from figure 11-4 of Schiller and Tehovnik (2015).
Figure 2: GABAergic circuits are ubiquitous throughout the neocortex. The illustration is for GABAergic connectivity generic to the visual cortex of mammals. Based on Froudarakis et al. (2019).
I am not sure that one needs to invoke concatenation of perception blocks , As a physiologist, I am convinced that an organism integrates all the successive bouts of states throughout his life, Thus, perception through all its adaptive transformations is a chain of successive bouts, each being characterized by a certain "state" of "receptivity" as "temporal windows".
In this way, being alive is preferred to perception as it includes all transformations, whatever the scale (cellular, organic, systemic,etc).
A small book (in french) is prepared for september and will be announced as "Les fenêtres du temps: regards croisés" by Pierrre Gisel et Françoise Schenk, Reflets du Maquis 4, Infolio.
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