I have just read the obituary of a neuroscientist in The Guardian
The account of his work seems to give an insight into how we can be invisible to drivers.
Neuroscientist who explored the principles of how the brain enables us to see
He is best known for demanding answers to the question of how such a complex system could work most efficiently. He was influenced by early computer scientists, and was a pioneer in seeing visual signals as information to be processed. His concept of “efficient coding” predicted that of all the information presented to the eye, the brain would transmit the minimum necessary, wasting no energy on redundant signals.
His ideas about reducing redundancy incorporated statistical approaches to probability, showing how the brain can fill in the blanks in the information it receives by estimating the likelihood of something happening in the real world. The concept of redundancy reduction, modified over time as it became apparent that some redundancy is itself useful as the brain learns, has been hugely influential.
“Instead of thinking of neural representations as transformations of stimulus energies,” wrote Barlow in a typically elegant summary after decades of work, “we should regard them as approximate estimates of the probable truths of hypotheses about the current environment.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/aug/23/horace-barlow-obituary
