Form Constants and Cortical Architecture
From the public record
Proposed by: Heinrich Kluver; Paul Bressloff and Jack Cowan
Geometric hallucinations mirror the wiring of the visual cortex itself. Similar brains produce similar forms, no external source required.
Heinrich Kluver catalogued recurring hallucination geometries in the 1920s, and Bressloff, Cowan and colleagues later showed mathematically how lattices, tunnels, spirals and cobwebs fall out of the architecture of the striate cortex. This is the strongest mechanistic account of why unconnected observers report similar patterns. Its open question is specificity: cortical geometry predicts classes of pattern, and the debate is whether reported symbol detail exceeds what the mechanism can supply.
Source: Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex (2001) (academic)
Tags: neuroscience, form-constants, skeptical