Serial Organization of Vision
Walter Makous
The brain is a device that transforms information from the environment into subjective experience, thoughts, and action. To understand how it does this one must discover its underlying functional organization: what is the sequence of operations that brings about the transformation between input and output, and how do the various neural structures and their component classes of nerve cells participate in these operations?
To answer those questions, I use a subsystem of the brain, the visual system, that presumably embodies the same principles of operation but presents a more tractable problem. Use of the visual system also allows us to exploit the optical coherence of lasers to create stimuli for perceptual experiments that functionally dissect the visual system, enabling one to observe specific stages at which information is lost as the signal propagates through the visual system. These techniques also enable one to observe and measure such things as the opening and closing of electrical connections between specific classes of nerve cells in the intact human visual system.