As someone who minored in neuroscience, I took away that edge detection is actually quite important to the way your vision works. Google search "center-surround

As someone who minored in neuroscience, I took away that edge detection is actually quite important to the way your vision works. Google search "center-surround receptive field of retinal ganglion cells". This happens in your eye, before the signal even enters the optic nerve to go to the brain. The brain itself is not detecting the edges; its input already has that information. I was also struck by the similarity between the way your cochlea (the organ in your ear that picks up sound waves) functions, and the way a Fourier transform works. They both transform the signal into the frequency domain, but your cochlea does it via its mechanical properties rather than by convolving the signal with a bunch of sine waves.