Kant in the Neuroscience lab…
Brain scans show that these geometric hallucinations originate lower down in the visual cortex where “a categorical dictionary of images” seems to reside—“proto-images,” as some neuroscientists call them. What is fascinating about them is their universality—they appear to exist in everyone, regardless of culture or personal history. Like the divine proportion of Fibonacci’s spiral in nature, geometric images seem to be built in to the architecture of our visual system in a pre-organized way. “Such activity operates at a basic cellular level,” Sacks writes, “far beneath the level of personal experience. The hallucinatory forms are, in this way, physiological universals of human experience.”
via The Hallucinators Among Us by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books.