There’s a fascinating letter in today’s Nature about how a footnote in one of Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novels inspired a branch of research in vision science on how the brain estimates when moving objects will arrive at a certain point.
The characters in the book discover an ominous black cloud that appears to be heading towards Earth. Will the cloud hit Earth and, if so, when? The first question is solved when the characters examine the relative speed at which the cloud is translating across the night sky to the rate at which it is looming, or seeming to get larger. The second question is tackled with a bit of impromptu algebra in which the time until impact is calculated from the ratio of the current size of the cloud to its rate of change…
David Lee realized in the 1970s that the brain can use the ratio of size to its rate of change, previously identified by Hoyle, to estimate the imminence of arrival. David Regan realized soon afterwards that the brain can use the ratio of lateral speed to looming rate to calculate where an object is travelling….
Since the early work of Lee and Regan, a considerable amount of research in areas including psychophysics, motor action, neurophysiology and computational modelling has followed (see D. Regan and R. Gray Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 99–107; 2000). The whole body of work that exists today can be traced back to a casual footnote and a couple of sketches in a science-fiction novel.
Fred Hoyle was a professional astronomer working at Cambridge University so knew plenty about mathematics, but wrote a number of notable science fiction novels during his lifetime.
The full letter is freely available at the following link.
Link to Nature letter ‘Hoyle’s observations were right on the ball’
Mind Hacks 