For years, neuroscientists have been monitoring the brain activity of mice as they looked at a wide range of images — including the film-noir classic “Touch of Evil” — in hopes of discovering deep insights about the workings of the visual system. Now they’ve come upon a plot twist worthy of director Orson Welles himself.
The latest results, reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience by researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and at the University of Washington, suggest that more than 90% of the neurons in the visual cortex don’t work the way scientists thought.
“We thought that there are simple principles according to which these neurons process visual information, and those principles are all in the textbooks,” Christof Koch, the brain institute’s chief scientist and president, said in a news release. ”But now that we can survey tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a more subtle — and much more complicated picture.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“To me, that’s the business. In some sense, that’s the exciting thing,” Michael Buice, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute and one of the study’s lead authors, told GeekWire. “We’re in a more interesting place than we thought.”
