Book Review: The Spike
Recently I asked one of my faculty advisors if he would ever write a popular science book. He’s a bestselling author in his own right, having written a textbook that…
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Retina
Understanding Visual Illusions Can Make Us More Empathetic
Philosophers and neuroscientists agree that if there is an objective reality, human beings can’t perceive it: philosophers refer to objective reality as a perception independent of any conscious awareness. Neuroscientists…
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Lighting Up The Brain With Optogenetics
Scientists studying pond scum discovered its peculiar ability to sense light, even without eyes. This discovery would eventually lead to a technique called optogenetics, one of the most powerful techniques…
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Seeing Invisible Colors
What would the world be like without color? Imagine you are a neurophysiologist, who studies color perception. You know that light is a wave and that humans perceive color according…
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Understanding the Visual System: A Conversation with Botond Roska
When we see the world, there is a huge amount of processing that occurs in the neural circuits of the retina, thalamus, and cortex before we can even begin to…
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Now Available in Trichromatic Color!
“What is color?”
What a good question! The answer is a bit tricky, but it starts with light. Color is the visual perception of different wavelengths of light reflecting off…
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Retinal Prostheses: Restoring Vision to the Blind
Vision is arguably one of our most important senses. We rely on it to recognize color, shape, movement, distance, and perspective about the world around us. Although all parts of…
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