Low-fidelity world

So an article covering neuroscience from a New Yorker article made me think of computer games (via Brad Delong):

...The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

So basically our connection with the real world has low bandwidth and we make up for that with our onboard graphics/sensory processor. I’d be curious what the breakdown is among other animals, is this common for most life forms or do those with less complex brains primarily rely on raw inputs?

In any event, that particular analogy makes it a bit easier for me to process this. It doesn’t mean we’re disconnected from the world, it just means we’ve got a client side intensive way of processing the world. Presumably higher bandwidths proved the more difficult to implement biological solution.