Perception from Sensor Geometry

An organism’s apparent perception can be driven more by the physical arrangement and nonlinear transduction of its sensors than by central computation. The Tel Aviv study shows sunflowers bend toward a weak light when two opposing strong lights cancel after nonlinear signal conversion — an 'illusion' produced by distributed sensing rather than a brain. — This reframes debates about cognition and agency (in microbes, plants, cell collectives) and matters for bioinspired robotics, interpretation of animal behaviour, and policies that treat 'perception' as evidence of higher cognition.