Making sense of at which direction and at what speed a car is moving may not be possible without the interpretation of the brain, but processing of some of these information starts right at the retinas of the eyes.
Researchers have now explained how the various types of cells in the retina are wired to help the eyes detect the direction and speed of moving objects.
“The wiring diagram represents only a tiny proportion of the total number of connections on the retina,” said Sebastian Seung, a computational neuro scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US..
Players traced the pathways through the layers of cells to create a high-resolution wiring diagram of part of the retina.
The bipolar cells that connect closer to the starburst amacrine cell bodies are known to relay their messages with a time delay, whereas the others transmit their immediately, the researchers discovered.
Because of the lag in the first type of connection, signals that hit two nearby locations on the retina at two slightly different times – as would happen when an object moves across the visual field – could reach the same amacrine-cell filament at the same time.
