Visual Neurons Don’t Work the Way Scientists Thought – “Much More Complicated”

 


Less than 10% of neurons in the mouse visual system behave the way scientists thought, most such cells work to perceive the outside world.


A new examination of the activity of nearly 60,000 neurons in the visual system of a mouse demonstrates how far we need to go to comprehend the brain's computations. The Allen Institute's analysis, which was published on December 16, 2019, in the international journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that more than 90% of the neurons in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes our visual world, don't work the way scientists thought they would, and it's not clear how they do work. Christof Koch, PhD, Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, and co-senior author on the study alongside R. Clay Reid, MD, PhD, Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, stated, "We thought that there are simple principles according to which these neurons process visual information, and those principles are in all the textbooks". But now that we can look at tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a much more subtle and complicated picture. Nearly 60 years ago, David and Torsten Wiesel, two neuroscientists, made ground-breaking discoveries about how the brains of mammals perceive the visual world around us. Individual neurons that only activate in response to very specific kinds of images were discovered by their research


A Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in recognition of the findings of H U B-E L and Wiesel. They found that our perception of the world is honed by neurons in the brain


Brain Activity Variability

The Allen Brain Observatory's publicly available data have been the subject of the first large-scale analysis in a new study. The mouse visual system's tens of thousands of neurons are recorded in the dataset. It saw that under 10% of the 60,000 neurons answered following the textbook model


How The Brain Computes

It is still unclear how these additional neurons aid in the processing of visual information. Although other research groups have demonstrated that locomotion can drive neuron activity in the visual part of the brain, the researchers found that running or not running only partially explained the variability in visual responses. 


They plan to repeat the same experiments using movies that are more realistic, giving the neurons more visual cues to respond to. A specialized reel of 10 hours of clips from nearly every nature documentary B U-I C-I could find has been created. 


The classic model is also based on studies of cats and primates, which, according to the researchers, evolved to see their worlds more clearly at the center of their vision than mice did. It's possible that mouse vision is entirely different from ours. However, B U-I C-I, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, stated that there are still principles from these studies that may be applicable to our own brains. 


Our objective was not to research vision; the study of how the cortex computes was our objective. According to B U-I C-I, "We believe that the cortex has a structure of computation that is universal, similar to the way that various kinds of computers can run the same programs". It doesn't matter what kind of program is running on the computer in the end; we want to know exactly how it runs programs

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