Are you a human scanner?

Scientific American "Those anti-bot security forms that slow you down when you're entering information just might serve a larger purpose. You're just about ready to buy a pair of tickets on Ticketmaster, but before you can take the next step, an annoying box with wavy letters and numbers shows up on your screen. You dutifully enter in what you see—and what a bot presumably can't—in the name of security."

"But what you may not know is that you also have helped archivists decipher distorted characters in old books and newspapers so that they can be posted on the Web."

A sign of human-machine collaborative thinking?

Computer Model Mimicks How Brain Recognizes Street Scenes

ScienceDaily — "At last, neuroscience is having an impact on computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). For the first time, scientists in Tomaso Poggio's laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT applied a computational model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach."