And of course there are still hundreds of right angles in a round crib - every vertical slat on the side goes up to a horizontal rail on the top.
If you keep a newborn kitten in a container with only vertical lines, it won’t be able to see horizontal lines! And vice versa. Their brains have periods of development for perceiving certain things, and if they don’t see the right things at the right time, they won’t ever see them at all. Normally, of course, they see everything necessary.
[/random factoid]
And some people doubt that perception is subjective.
Yeah, I’ve read the same thing; there’s reasons to believe our visual development really is altered by the shapes of things we see in our surroundings. The brain has a lot of specialized equipment, it seems, to identify geometric forms. I ran into references to the exact thing you’re describing (not sure if I read the paper or just ran into a summary of it somewhere) last year while writing a paper on a related subject. I wouldn’t know where to start looking for it either, though.
Our only requirement was that as soon as the kid could climb out, it could be turned up-side down and a cement block put on it.
Worked good. You learn a lot between baby one and baby two.
Yes, but in order to raise kittens not to see horizontal lines, you have to really mess with their environment.
Example: a baby placed down to sleep in only a rectangular crib, festooned with right angles, sees its mother’s oval face bending down from above.
And its own chubby hands shaped like nothing in the crib.
When I am slicing brains with the medical students I like to point out the lateral geniculate body, located just forward of the pineal gland (“third eye”) next to the best spot on the hippocampus. The LGB looks like an admiral’s hat - assuming they will have no facility with the mental image of Nelson, I tell them it looks like Cap’n Crunch’s hat. The lateral geniculate body is a major processing station for sight, halfway between the retina, where the light comes in, and the occipital cortex, where the raw data (semi-processed data, since it has passed through the LGB) becomes sight.
As I recall, out of date and of course with no cites (but when did that ever stop me), certain neurons fire when a horizontal bar moves across the visual field. Others for a vertical bar. Others for a diagonal bar facing one way, others for a diagonal bar facing another way. Some neurons serve only to slow down other neurons when they fire, others to speed them up. I believe some of this was shown from the cat experiments with the kittens with severely restricted visual fields. Which means it happened decades ago and all those poor little kitties have long been gone past the ends of their natural lives. (This comment interpolated for SnakesCatLady)
The summation of all the firing neurons goes out the optic nerves, performs a complicated railroad-style switching operation at the optic chiasm, and heads into the brain to be re-processed at the LGB. At which point, it is not sight.
It becomes sight in the occipital cortex, after yet another series of unimaginable processing. There is such a thing as “occipital blindness”, that is, a person with perfectly functional eyes who cannot see because of a brain injury to the back of the head. Screw with the main processor, it doesn’t matter if the modem is hooked up.
Ain’t life cool???
Is this kitten experiment perhaps where that absurd urban legend (uh…preurban legend? arboreal legend?) that the Indians literally couldn’t see the European ships because they had no concept of large sailing vessels came from? [/hijack]
Well, it’s conceivable, I guess. I suppose if you read that whole thing as “you can’t see what you’re not used to seeing”, then it makes sense, although that’s such a poor interpretation of the kitten data that it’s ridiculous.
I’m more inclined to think that people pushing crazy ideologies don’t really depend too much upon fact to get them started. The whole thing also reminds me a little bit of the legend (fact? I don’t really know) that the Aztecs thought that Cortez was the return of their mythical god.
Read a so called story once about a family that rigged the house with flying wires and then let the baby see them flying all the time and kept all outside influences away from him. They kept encouraging the kid and one day when he was about 4-5, he flew with them, only he had no hidden wires…
And what, jumped off a roof?? (To GusNSpot). You didn’t finish the story!
[BTW, I just noticed your name is GusNSpot and not GuNspot as I always read it. Weird.)
Anyway, I am oh-so-glad my future sister-in-law didn’t happen across this crib. She is already getting an $800 stroller plus various other baby accoutrements which she is not paying for - all as gifts. Ah, I figure she’s taken the pressure off me to have kids so I won’t complain, but sometimes I just wanna look at her and say “How in the HELL do poor people have babies?”
Two minutes and a reload after hitting the reply button I, for one, am willing to set up a pulley system and donate my excess power to The Reader. Hampster seems tired.
That’s easy. Inside, outside, topside, bottom side. Duh. 
Hey, you were the one who told her to ‘go sit in the corner’. 
Damn you, Antigen!
I knew childhod obesity as getting more prevalent, but all this talk of round babies and special cribs for them is disconcerting.
I’m in the ‘it’s got probably no real benefit, it’s pretty impractical, it’s showoffy’ sect, but I’d still want one if I could get and house it, just because I’ve always wanted to have a round cushiony pit for a bed. I’m not even being sarcastic. 