Processing signals

There may only be four fundamental forces in our universe, but they are all signals. By signal, we mean any kind of feature representations we may have of a real-world phenomenon. Our visual world, for example, is full of signals that indicate motion, color, and shapes. These are very dynamic signals, and it is a miracle that biology is able to process these stimuli so accurately, even if we do say so ourselves. Of course, in the grander scheme of things, realizing that nature has had hundreds of millions of years to perfect this recipe may humble us, if only a little. For now, we can admire the marvel that is the human visual cortex, which is equipped with 140 million densely interconnected neurons. In fact, an entire series of layers (V1 – V5) exist through which information propagates as we engage in progressively more complex image processing tasks...