Phosphenes as Visual Categories

After reading some of Chomsky's work on innate transformative grammar, I must say I feel quite humbled in realizing how little I know about linguistics. Chomsky's work is remarkable in its depth and it appears almost scathingly flawless in its logic (politics aside). Yesterday I was considering the possibility that an innate grammar (or structural syntax) might also provide the framework for the way in which we organize visual imagery. But Chomsky's insistence on modularity makes me think that perhaps trying to use an innate grammar for visual processing is quite likely sheer folly.

Another line of thinking occured as I was driving into work this morning. What if phosphenes act as hard-wired visual categories that represent the prototypical movements observed in our natural, physical world? In other words, perhaps phosphenes represent the paths or trails, through physical space of animals, insects, clouds, water and everything else that a human might observe in nature. Imagine water going down the drain in a spiral shape, or rings emanating outward when a drop hits the surface of water, or a squirrel running across a tree limb, or a rock dropping off the edge of a cliff. We know that we share some instinctual fear reactions to certain silhouette shapes, such as a starburst spider shape, with animals. Could it be that the phosphenes are categories onto which we later map specific instances that are obtained from our interaction with the real world? That these categories become increasingly dense (or rich) with experience over time.