Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

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ODo not the biggest questions in the modern era are: is it a cake? As in: is it an espresso machine or a cake? Pinter Can or Gake? Air Fryer, or…? Millions of viewers have watched the delighted bakers of Tiktok decide or bite in non -edible objects with soft bowels and filled with frosting … or are attentive Is it a cake?The Netflix show aptly named. For what? As a form of entertainment, this type of visual thing is hardly new. For centuries, artists have delighted to be mistaken to think that a material is another. Michelangelo marble David, With its pulse and sweet flesh, in Giovanni Strazza Veiled virgindraped in a marble veil which seems thin gossamer. What makes these illusions so fascinating? It is perhaps because these classic works of art and these modern social media rus are testing our ability to use an underestimated competence which was essential to the survival of our species: identifying things made.

During the last century, neurosciences made great progress to understand how the brain visually identifies objects, such as cups, trees and faces. But the question of how we recognize what these objects are made (smooth porcelain, rough bark, soft flesh) has been neglected until relatively recently. “Our world contains both things and things, but things tend to attract attention,” wrote Edward H. Adelson, a MIT neuroscientist, including the provocative article of 2001, “on things: the perception of materials by humans and machines”, stimulated a wave of research on the perception of materials.¹

“However, the materials are just as important as objects,” he wrote. “Our world involves steel and glass, paper and plastic, food and drinks, leather and lace, ice and snow, not to mention sweat and blood tears.”

IIt is strange that the field of material perception is so new, given most of the ability to decipher what things are done. “When we look in our world, everything is made of materials,” explains Alexandra Schmid, postdoctoral at the National Institutes of Health Institute of Mental Health. “And we need this information to know how to interact with this world.” Recognizing what an object does tells us – as he said to our ancestors – how we can interact with him: Can we press him? Eat? Touch it without burning or scratching? Pick up? (And if so, using the amount of force?) The perception of materials helps us to spot the light of potentially potential water and to sort the firm and fresh fruits of wrinkled and rotten fruits. Humans, like chimpanzees, use materials of materials such as hardness to determine if a rock is an appropriate weapon or tool. And the brains that are optimally set to make these types of decisions effectively and with precision are essentially essential to the survival and success of reproduction, especially since our evolutionary predecessors have sailed in the movements of early human history.

Even when we do not see equipment, our minds can fill the white with what it should look like.

Since the provocative article of Adelson two decades ago, the study of material perception has exploded. Recent studies have studied the way we categorize specific materials, such as wood or metal, as well as the properties of isolated materials, including hardness, color or elasticity. Dozens of papers exclusively approach our perception of “brilliant”. However, despite the neuroscientific progress that study how our brains give meaning to this narrow strip of materials and properties, until recently, researchers did not have the smallest meaning of the duration or range of materials that humans perceive.

Now an article recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Offers a generalized and generalized approach to understand material perception.² Most previous research has focused on the test of specific material qualities that scientists would predecessor as important for perception, such as shine, hardness or color. Schmidt and his co-authors of PNA The paper has adopted a different approach: let the models emerge naturally from behavioral data. By using methods borrowed from automatic learning, they were able to discover 36 fundamental dimensions that our brains consider to understand the materials.

“We wanted to adopt an upward approach,” explains Martin Hebart, researcher at the University of Justus Liebig Giessen who co-author. “To get a bigger image and understand the things we should care about and study.”

The team started by collecting a set of data from 600 images of 200 different materials – for example, brick, velvet, glass paper, plastic. Then, they presented thousands of participants with sets of three images and asked them to assess which of the two images was most similar to the third image (reference). After collecting nearly 2 million notes, they used a technique borrowed from automatic learning to derive 36 “central dimensions of the perception of materials”. These are essentially the cognitive axes that humans use to sort the materials. For example, we use the “mineral” dimension to sort the images by the way they appear rough, rocky, hard or otherwise mineral. Other dimensions evaluate objects by the way in which the fabric-y or what they resemble metallic. Certain dimensions corresponded to the categories that the previous experiments had studied, such as texture and color. Others – like “crystalline”, “small” and “spongy” – were a novel. In theory, these 36 dimensions can now help researchers understand what the human brain is grasping when it decides that a rock looks more like a mirror than for, say, a soft cover.

“Their article really prevents us from understanding how we really recognize things,” said Robert Kentridge, professor at the University of Durham who was not involved in the study. “It really makes you think about the different ways to determine the functioning of the vision, how we end up with superior representations.”

SCientes only begin to understand how the human brain identifies materials. It is an apparently simple task, subtracting from complex calculations that occur in the blink of an eye. Consider a soap bubble – its shiny surface reflects whatever the environment in which it is. Visually, it can be entirely different from one adjustment to another. However, our brains have no difficulty identifying it as the same brilliant and filmed object each time. Despite the dramatic change of appearance, we perceive coherence. How?

Recognizing what an object does we tell us how we can interact with him: Can we press him? Eat?

At first, researchers hypothesized that the brain could have dedicated regions to detect specific material qualities, such as shine. They proposed that neural circuits can solve an “reverse optical problem” – which influences the physical properties of a surface by analyzing the models of light striking the retina. However, this approach turned out to be intractable on the computer. Now, the area has come to consider the perception of materials as a gestalt process – which exploits a diverse range of neural circuits. Rather than relying on a single specialized region of specialized “materials”, our brains rely on a network of systems that incorporate low -level visual characteristics with higher order knowledge – such as context, memory, touch and experience of the real world – to determine what something is done. “We definitely see a distributed network,” said Schmidt. “There is no” stuff “area. It’s everywhere.”

In 2021 Neuroimage The paper, the schmid and the collaborators wanted to see what would happen in the brain when we detected the movement of the materials – such as the beating tissue or the flickering jelly – but without any visual surface texture.³ To test this, they created what she calls “dynamic points materials”, black dots on gray background that simulated the movement of materials. When the study participants saw these moving points, they were able to guess what material they represented, such as jelly or liquid. In addition, scans of their brain have shown activation through visual tracks, somatosensory areas and even motor regions. “It was surprising, because we saw activations in regions that were not historically considered to deal with movement … including the areas that were supposed to deal with the texture of objects and models,” explains Schmid.

All this implies that even when we do not see equipment, our minds can, to some extent, fill the white with what it should look like and how it should behave. The brain “identifies the object as a tissue beating in the wind, portrays the weight of the object under gravity and plans what it felt to reach out and touch the material”, write the authors of the study. The brain does not only see materials; He experiences them through several sensory dimensions.

All these recent surveys reveal how cabled – and in a complex and surprising way – to recognize what things are done. Which may explain why we are so fascinated by the illusions that question this capacity. A problem in our material perception systems could ruin our ability to interact appropriately and productively with the world. Hence the lasting question: is it a cake?

References

1. Adelson, eh to see things: the perception of humans and machines materials. SPIE Acts – The International Optical Engineering Society 4299 (2001).

2. Schmidt, F., Hebart, MN, Schmid, AC and Fleming, RW Core Dimensions of the perception of human material. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences E2417202122 (2025).

3. Schmid, AC, Boyaci, H., and Doerschner, K. Dynamic dot posters reveal a material movement network in the human brain. Neuroimage 117688 (2021).

Lead image: ciciliana / shutterstock

• Dale Markowitz

  Published on July 3, 2025

  Dale Markowitz is a software writer and engineer based in Austin, Texas.