Wiring of retina reveals how eyes sense motion
Online gamers helped researchers map neuron connections involved in detecting direction of moving objects.
A vast project to map neural connections in the mouse retina may have answered the long-standing question of how the eyes detect motion. With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction.
It is sometimes said that we see with the brain rather than the eyes, but this is not entirely true. People can only make sense of visual information once it has been interpreted by the brain, but some of this information is processed partly by neurons in the retina. In particular, 50 years ago researchers discovered that the mammalian retina is sensitive to the direction and speed of moving images. This showed that motion perception begins in the retina, but researchers struggled to explain how.
