Possible principles underlying the transformation of sensory messages
This paper suggests the Efficient coding hypothesis (redundancy-reducing hypothesis).
A wing would be a most mystifying structure if one did not know that birds flew. … I think that we may be at an analogous point in our understanding of the sensory side of the central nervous system.
Hypotheses:
- Sensory relays are for detecting, in the incoming messages, certain “passwords” that have a particular key significance for the animal.
- They are filters, or recoding centers, whose “pass characteristics” can be controlled in accordance with the requirements of other parts of the nervous system.
- They recode sensory messages, extracting signals of high relative entropy from the highly redundant sensory input.