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Thread: Interesting article on retina vision processing

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    Master OptiBoarder OptiBoard Silver Supporter Barry Santini's Avatar
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    Interesting article on retina vision processing

    in the latest SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. If you are at all technical, and want to see the latest in science's understanding of the actual *neural processing and filtering* that goes on in the retina only, this article is a must read! The web MPEGS that conjoin the article are excellent as well.

    Barry

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    Master OptiBoarder rinselberg's Avatar
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    Thanks so much Barry. I passed your reference to a friend who also appreciated this article. Here's an introduction ...

    The Movies in Our Eyes
    By Frank Werblin and Botond Roska

    We take our astonishing visual capabilities so much for granted that few of us ever stop to consider how we actually see. For decades, scientists have likened our visual-processing machinery to a television camera: the eye’s lens focuses incoming light onto an array of photoreceptors in the retina. These light detectors magically convert those photons into electrical signals that are sent along the optic nerve to the brain for processing. But recent experiments by the two of us and others indicate that this analogy is inadequate. The retina actually performs a significant amount of preprocessing right inside the eye and then sends a series of partial representations to the brain for interpretation.

    We came to this surprising conclusion after investigating the retinas of rabbits, which are remarkably similar to those in humans. (Our work with salamanders has led to similar results.) The retina, it appears, is a tiny crescent of brain matter that has been brought out to the periphery to gain more direct access to the world.

    How does the retina construct the representations it sends? What do they “look” like when they reach the brain’s visual centers? How do they convey the vast richness of the real world? Do they impart meaning, helping the brain to analyze a scene? These are just some of the compelling questions the work has begun to answer.

    Overall, we have found that specialized nerve cells, or neurons, deep within the retina, project what can be thought of as a dozen movie tracks—distinct abstractions of the visual world. Each track embodies a primitive representation of one aspect of the scene that the retina continuously updates and streams to the brain. One track, for example, transmits a line drawing like image that details only the edges of objects. Another responds to motion, often in a specific direction. Some tracks carry information about shadows or highlights. The representations of still other tracks are difficult to categorize. Each track is transmitted by its own
    population of fibers within the optic nerve to higher visual centers in the brain, where even more sophisticated processing takes place.

    The retina processes more information than anyone has ever imagined, sending a dozen different movie tracks to the brain ...

    http://scientificamerican.com/


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