Short definitions for the encyclopedia. These are intentionally practical rather than exhaustive.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Accommodation | The eye lens changing shape to focus at different distances. |
| Active sensorimotor loop | A perception-action cycle where movement helps structure what the user senses and learns. |
| Addressing | Selecting where a signal goes, such as a pixel, retinal location, or cortical region. |
| Air Loom | James Tilly Matthews’s claimed hidden machine for remote influence, recorded by John Haslam in 1810. |
| Amacrine cell | Retinal interneuron involved in timing, motion, and local signal shaping. |
| Analog signal | A continuous signal whose value changes smoothly over time. |
| Backlight | Light source behind an LCD panel. |
| Carrier | The physical medium or phenomenon carrying information. |
| Cathode | Electron-emitting source in a CRT. |
| Cathode-ray tube | Vacuum tube display that scans an electron beam onto phosphor. |
| Cone | Retinal photoreceptor important for color and high-acuity vision. |
| Cortical prosthesis | Device intended to stimulate visual cortex to create useful percepts. |
| Cue grammar | A consistent rule set for turning features, events, confidence, and urgency into learnable outputs. |
| Deflection | Steering a beam using electric or magnetic fields. |
| Electrode array | Multiple electrical contacts used to stimulate or record tissue. |
| Event camera | Sensor that reports changes rather than full frames. |
| Feature code | Representation using edges, motion, contrast, color, depth, or shape instead of pixels. |
| Frontier concept | Far-future or not-yet-demonstrated idea preserved for hypothesis building and conceptual mapping. |
| Fovea | Central high-acuity region of the retina. |
| Foveated rendering | Allocating high detail near gaze or attention and lower detail elsewhere. |
| Ganglion cell | Retinal output neuron whose axons form the optic nerve. |
| Influencing machine | A psychiatric and historical term for a claimed machine experienced as controlling thoughts, sensations, feelings, movements, or speech. |
| LGN | Lateral geniculate nucleus, a thalamic relay in the visual pathway. |
| MicroLED | Display made from microscopic self-emitting LEDs. |
| OLED | Organic light-emitting diode display, where pixels emit their own light. |
| Object memory | Interface memory that keeps track of important static objects after an event stream stops changing. |
| Optic nerve | Bundle of ganglion-cell axons carrying visual information to the brain. |
| Optogenetics | Technique that makes cells responsive to light through light-sensitive proteins. |
| Phosphene | Perceived light sensation not caused by ordinary light entering the eye. |
| Phosphor | Material that emits visible light after excitation. |
| Photoreceptor | Retinal cell that converts light into biological signals. |
| Phototransduction | Biological conversion of light into cellular/electrical activity in photoreceptors. |
| Perception-as-medium | Design stance where the trained human perceptual loop completes the representation instead of a device carrying a full image. |
| Perceptual codec | Encoder that preserves task-useful cues rather than full photorealistic imagery. |
| Passivity experience | Experience in which thoughts, feelings, impulses, or actions seem to be generated or controlled from outside the self. |
| Pixel | Smallest addressable picture element in a display. |
| Population code | Information represented by activity across many neurons. |
| Raster scan | Line-by-line scanning pattern used by CRTs and video systems. |
| Receptive field | Region of sensory space that affects a neuron or cell. |
| Retina | Neural tissue at the back of the eye that detects and preprocesses light. |
| Retinal prosthesis | Device that stimulates retinal tissue to produce useful visual percepts. |
| Retinotopy | Spatial mapping where neighboring visual-field points map to neighboring neural tissue. |
| Rod | Highly light-sensitive photoreceptor important for low-light vision. |
| Semantic cue | Meaning-level information, such as “door ahead” or “person right.” |
| Sensory substitution | Translating information from one sense into another, such as vision into touch. |
| Spike train | Sequence of neural action potentials over time. |
| TMS | Transcranial magnetic stimulation, a noninvasive way to induce neural activity using magnetic fields. |
| Transducer | A converter from one physical form of information into another. |
| Transparent tool | A tool that becomes fluent enough that the user attends through it to the world rather than mainly attending to the tool itself. |
| V1 | Primary visual cortex. |
| Visual prosthesis | Device intended to restore or substitute some visual function. |
| Waveguide | Optical structure that routes light, often used in near-eye displays. |