Something I’ve noticed myself in studying and writing about neuroscience is that I can be quite good at visualizing a lot of specific details about a 3D object, but still terrible at describing it clearly.
I think I’m pretty good at visualizing 3D objects, as far as human go, but I’ve spent a number of fruitless hours attempting to conceptualize 4D objects and remain totally lost. I can memorize facts about higher dimensional objects, but my intuitions fail me.
When you try to map the curved cortical sheet as a 2D surface it’s suddenly harder for me to recognize the otherwise familiar shapes. But there are definitely advantages to a 2D projection.
But going even simpler, to representing the data simply as a matrix, is even easier to interpret, but you then have to make a lot of choices about which aspects of the data to represent in this reduced simplified form:
Something I’ve noticed myself in studying and writing about neuroscience is that I can be quite good at visualizing a lot of specific details about a 3D object, but still terrible at describing it clearly. I think I’m pretty good at visualizing 3D objects, as far as human go, but I’ve spent a number of fruitless hours attempting to conceptualize 4D objects and remain totally lost. I can memorize facts about higher dimensional objects, but my intuitions fail me.
An article related to this that I like: http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi-bin/PvsNP.py?SpikeySpheres#HN2
When you try to map the curved cortical sheet as a 2D surface it’s suddenly harder for me to recognize the otherwise familiar shapes. But there are definitely advantages to a 2D projection.
https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/6518ce2f-b8cd-48cd-b65d-e747bc739379/gr4.jpg
(source: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(23)00338-0)
Similar data presented as a movie of a spinning object feels easier to process:
https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.028/attachment/4b6b7fc0-c799-4104-9a4e-faef37a14288/mmc2.mp4
But going even simpler, to representing the data simply as a matrix, is even easier to interpret, but you then have to make a lot of choices about which aspects of the data to represent in this reduced simplified form:
https://dataportal.brainminds.jp/marmoset-tracer-injection/connection-matrix