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Motion processing picks up speed in the brain

Recordings of individual neurons in the mouse brain reveal a main mechanism for motion processing in the primary visual cortex. These findings are likely to have implications for other species.
  1. Jose Manuel Alonso

    1. Jose Manuel Alonso is in the College of Optometry, State University of New York, New York, New York 10036, USA

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Imagine life without visual motion. You can easily recognize a face, but you cannot safely cross the street because you do not see cars moving. Instead, you see snapshots of stationary cars that change position at unpredictable times. Most of us do not have this problem, because healthy brains contain many neurons that are direction selective — they fire strongly when they detect movement in one direction (known as their preferred direction, towards the left of the eye’s field of view, for instance), and relatively weakly in response to movement in the opposite direction1. These direction-selective neurons are found in different parts of the brain, including the cerebral cortex. In a paper in Nature, Lien and Scanziani2 report a major advance in our understanding of how neurons in the brain’s primary visual cortex become direction selective.

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Nature 558, 38-39 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-04289-9

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