The visual cortex is a contact bundle

Abstract

It is now generally accepted among neuroscientists that the sensory cortex of the brain is arranged in a structure that is simultaneously “topographic” (a pointwise mapping), layered, and columnar. The microcolumns in the columnar structure exhibit both a directional and an areal response in addition to the pointwise one. It is shown that these directional-areal response fields are contact elements upon the visual manifold that generate visual contours as the “lifts” of the form stimuli upon the retina into a contact bundle embodied in the visual cortex itself. Those invariances of form perception termed the “psychological constancies” -shape, size, motion, color constancies, etc.-represent the action of the conformal group CO(1,3) upon the visual manifold. It follows that the connection for the cortical contact bundle is a Lie group connection. The paper closes with an axiomatic treatment of visual perception and expression of Riegel's dialectical psychology in terms of the symmetric difference operation to provide an association between perceptual and cognitive function.