Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Eye, Not Just Brain, Seeks Out New Images
One of the best posts on Boing Boing this last week. It's not just the brain that seeks out new images, it's the eye itelf:
The retina actively seeks out new sights and ignores the commonplace, report Harvard University scientists. The researchers presented salamanders and rabbits with various visual scenes and studied the neural signals from retinal ganglion cells that deliver images to the brain. The sensitivity of the individual cells spiked when the animals were faced with things they hadn't seen before. From a press release about the work, published in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature
posted by The Daily Pick at 1:58 AM