Vision Science Reveals the Brain's Wonders

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Studying the brain and vision exposes researchers to the fascinating processes of visual perception that involve personal experience and scientific inquiry. Vision scientists actively engage with the miracle of sight, leading to an understanding of various visual cortex areas, including V1, V2, and V3, each playing distinct roles in processing visual information. While V1 is known for early edge detection, other areas contribute to more complex functions like segmentation and texture recognition. Additionally, the visual processing system operates through two main streams: the dorsal stream, which is involved in spatial awareness and motion, and the ventral stream, which specializes in object recognition, illuminating the complexity and richness of visual perception.

The human brain does a pretty amazing job of taking in a huge amount of data from multiple sensory modalities -- vision, hearing, smell, etc. -- and constructing a coherent picture of the world, constantly being updated in real time. (Although perhaps in discrete moments, rather than continuously, as we learn in this podcast...) We're a long way from completely understanding how that works, but amazing progress has been made in identifying specific parts of the brain with specific functions in this process. Today we talk to leading neuroscientist Doris Tsao about the specific workings of vision, from how we recognize faces to how we construct a model of the world around us.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-doris-tsao-on-how-the-brain-turns-vision-into-the-world/

Doris Tsao received her Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of molecular and cell biology, and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the Eppendorf and Science International Prize in Neurobiology, the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.

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