Another interesting side note is that wavelets (Gabor wavelets in particular) have been shown to look very much like receptive fields in the primary visual cort

Another interesting side note is that wavelets (Gabor wavelets in particular) have been shown to look very much like receptive fields in the primary visual cortex. The suggestion is that such receptive fields evolved as an efficient way to encode images of natural scenes. A couple of nice references are David. J Field. Wavelets, vision, and the statistics of natural scenes. (1999) http://redwood.psych.cornell.edu/papers/field_wavelets_1999.pdf http://redwood.psych.cornell.edu/papers/field_wavelets_1999.... David J. Field. What is the goal of sensory coding? (1994) http://redwood.psych.cornell.edu/courses/psych527fall05/papers/Field1994_Sensory.pdf http://redwood.psych.cornell.edu/courses/psych527fall05/pape...