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Comment by deadbeeves | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure the eye spends exactly zero Joules on interpretation of visual stimuli.

As for the brain, the brain doesn't see characters at the perceptual level, that it then needs to join at the cognitive level into tokens. At the perceptual level it just sees shapes. Whether it takes more energy to parse != or ≠ is something I don't anyone has ever researched.

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You'd be wrong then, because it's (biomedical) textbook knowledge that quite a bit of processing of visual stimuli happens in the retina.

You might be surprised to hear that the eye actually does a lot of "preprocessing" for the brain.

Preprocessing is not the same as interpretation, in the same way that a pixel shader is not computer vision.

Everything is quite fuzzy in the brain... The eye already does basic pattern recognition (stripes, contrasts, rings).

One could argue that that is already part of the character detection/interpretation process.

it does involve energy though, which was the original premis. Now whether total number of joules consumed over <> vs != vs ≠ is the real debate and gonna be hard to study I think...

A roughly fist-sized lump of your brain seems to be responsible for all the vision processing. It is as power-hungry as its size suggests.

Ever wonder why you can't really seem to read properly when you're hungry and tired? That part of your brain is in power-saving mode.

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