Binocular Rivalry

Evan Thompson, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, presented the idea of that the self is a process, not a thing nor an entity, which means that self is a experiential process that is subject to the constant change in Waking, Dreaming, Being (Thompson XXXI). As well as Thompson gives the idea of the self, he also mentioned that the three things men need to understanding. The three things are the nature of awareness, the contents of awareness, and the self-experienced (XXXII). In his study, Thompson focused on different subjects of concerning the nature of awareness, the contents of awareness, or the self-experienced; but chapter two is more focuses on attention and perception in the waking state. In the waking

In the alter, macaque monkeys’ experiments, Logothetis investigated ambiguities that result when two completely different visual patterns are presented simultaneously to each eye, a phenomenon was determined and known as binocular rivalry (20). From Thompson’s presentation, the binocular rivalry seems to offer not only a way to differentiate between conscious and unconscious visual contents at the different level of the brain, but also to dissociate the neural activity corresponding directly to conscious visual perception from the neural activity associated with unconscious processing of the stimulus (Thompson 26). As well as Logothetis mentioned in his study that when people are put in such situation, human brains become more aware of the first of one perception and then the other, in a slowly alternating sequence (“The Art” 20). And additionally Logothetis mentioned in another study that a characteristic property of rivalry is that the consecutive periods of visibility and physical property of a pattern—which are sometimes mentioned because the pattern’s (or the eye’s) “dominance” and “suppression” phases—are actually stochastic; in different words, the apparently random alternations of rivalry are not thanks to the chaotic behavior of a dynamic neural system (“Single Units”

During the experiment, the scientist used electrodes to record the activity of neurons in the visual-processing pathway, and the neurons vary markedly in their responsiveness when identical stimuli are presented to both eyes simultaneously (21). By recording the information from neurons during the experiment, an experimenter can evaluated which neurons change their activity only when the stimuli changed and which neurons altered their rate of firing when the animal reports a changed perception that is not accompanied by a change in the stimuli (22). In the short, most of the neurons in the earlier stages of the visual pathway responded mainly to whether their preferred visual stimulus was in the view or not in the view. While in the later stages of processing, the proportion neurons whose activity reflected the perception of animal as increased. The experimental proof showed resolutely that input from each eyes is incessantly processed within the visual system during binocular rivalry. Even the competing stimuli are switched rapidly between the two eyes in humans, binocular rivalry still produced its normal slow alternation of perceptions. The discovered persistence of slowly dynamical rivalrous perceptions when stimuli are switched powerfully suggests that