What Does the Eye Tell
the Brain?:
A Journey from High
Energy Physics to Neural Systems
Santa Cruz
Institute for Particle Physics,
The back of the eye is lined by an
extraordinary biological pixel detector, the retina. This neural network is
able to extract vital information about the external visual world, and transmit
this information in a timely manner to the brain. In this talk, after a brief introduction
to vision, I will describe a system we have implemented to study how the retina
processes and encodes dynamic visual images. This system can simultaneously
record the extracellular electrical activity from hundreds of retinal output
neurons as a movie is focused on the input neurons. I will show some first
results obtained with this system, and describe some additional applications.
This project is based on techniques and expertise acquired in the development
of silicon microstrip detectors for high energy physics experiments.