Visual Neuroscience

We, like many other mammals, are essentially visual animals. Thus the visual system of our brains must achieve a daunting task: it creates, in real time, an internal representation of the external world that it is used by other parts of the brain to guide our behavior. But, how do we actually see? how does this neural system accomplish the job? A parsimonious explanation proposes that visual information is analyzed in a series of sequential steps starting in the retina and continuing along the multiple visual cortical areas. As a result, the information captured by the approximately 105 millions of photoreceptors in the back of each eye is continuously rearranged in a complex combination of points and lines of different orientations and curvatures that are defined by differences in local contrast, color, relative timing, depth, movement, etc. Ultimately, by mechanisms that remain largely unknown, these elementary features of the image are integrated into the perception (our “visi