Function
It has long been believed that ocular dominance columns play some role in binocular vision. Another candidate function for ocular dominance columns (and for columns in general) is the minimization of connection lengths and processing time, which could be evolutionarily important. It has even been suggested that the ocular dominance columns serve no function.
Read more about this topic: Ocular Dominance Column
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.”
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931)
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)