In neuroanatomy, the lateral geniculate nucleus is a structure in the thalamus and a key component of the mammalian visual pathway. It is a small, ovoid, ventral projection of the thalamus where the thalamus connects with the optic nerve. There are two LGNs, one on the left and another on the right side of the thalamus. In humans, both LGNs have six layers of neurons alternating with optic fibers.
In neuroanatomy, the superior colliculus is a structure lying on the roof of the mammalian midbrain. In non-mammalian vertebrates, the homologous structure is known as the optic tectum or optic lobe. The adjective form tectal is commonly used for both structures.
Ocular dominance columns are stripes of neurons in the visual cortex of certain mammals that respond preferentially to input from one eye or the other. The columns span multiple cortical layers, and are laid out in a striped pattern across the surface of the striate cortex (V1). The stripes lie perpendicular to the orientation columns.
Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Michael Francis "Mike" Land FRS was a British neurobiologist. He was a professor of neurobiology in the vision laboratory at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, University of Sussex, England.
Richard Alan Andersen is an American neuroscientist. He is the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His research focuses on visual physiology with an emphasis on translational research to humans in the field of neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and cortical repair.
Christine Elizabeth Holt is a British developmental neuroscientist.
Retinal waves are spontaneous bursts of action potentials that propagate in a wave-like fashion across the developing retina. These waves occur before rod and cone maturation and before vision can occur. The signals from retinal waves drive the activity in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) and the primary visual cortex. The waves are thought to propagate across neighboring cells in random directions determined by periods of refractoriness that follow the initial depolarization. Retinal waves are thought to have properties that define early connectivity of circuits and synapses between cells in the retina. There is still much debate about the exact role of retinal waves. Some contend that the waves are instructional in the formation of retinogeniculate pathways, while others argue that the activity is necessary but not instructional in the formation of retinogeniculate pathways.
Gerald Westheimer is an Australian scientist at University of California, Berkeley researching the eye, its optics, and how we see details in space and in three dimensions.
Sheila Nirenberg is an American neuroscientist and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. She works in the field of neural coding, developing new kinds of prosthetic devices that can communicate directly with the brain, and new kinds of smart robots. She is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award and has been the subject of, or featured in, several documentaries for her technology for treating blindness.
Donald Benjamin Lindsley was an American physiological psychologist most known as a pioneer in the field of brain function study. Considered by his colleagues to have been worthy of winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering the reticular activating system along with Horace Winchell (Tid) Magoun and Giuseppe Moruzzi, Lindsley was instrumental in demonstrating the use of electroencephalography (EEG) in the study of brain function.
Douglas G. McMahon is a professor of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. McMahon has contributed several important discoveries to the field of chronobiology and vision. His research focuses on connecting the anatomical location in the brain to specific behaviors. As a graduate student under Gene Block, McMahon identified that the basal retinal neurons (BRNs) of the molluscan eye exhibited circadian rhythms in spike frequency and membrane potential, indicating they are the clock neurons. He became the 1986 winner of the Society for Neuroscience's Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience for his work. Later, he moved on to investigate visual, circadian, and serotonergic mechanisms of neuroplasticity. In addition, he helped find that constant light can desynchronize the circadian cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). He has always been interested in the underlying causes of behavior and examining the long term changes in behavior and physiology in the neurological modular system. McMahon helped identifying a retrograde neurotransmission system in the retina involving the melanopsin containing ganglion cells and the retinal dopaminergic amacrine neurons.
Frank Werblin is Professor of the Graduate School, Division of Neurobiology, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew David Huberman is an American neuroscientist and podcaster. He is an associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Since 2021, he has hosted the popular health and science focused Huberman Lab podcast. The podcast has attracted criticism for promoting poorly supported health claims. Huberman has promoted and partnered with health supplement companies.
John Douglas (Doug) Crawford is a Canadian neuroscientist and the Scientific Director of the Connected Minds program. He is a professor at York University where he holds the York Research Chair in Visuomotor Neuroscience and the title of Distinguished Research Professor in Neuroscience.
John S. Werner is an American scientist who studies human vision and its changes across the life span. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Science, and Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior. His work has been cited ~ 17,000 times.
Denis Aristide Baylor was an American neurobiologist. He was professor emeritus of neurobiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research on nerve cells in the retina of the eye. He developed a widely-used method for observing the electrical activity of single rod and cone photoreceptor cells and described how they encode light stimuli. Baylor’s work has been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London.
Marla Beth Feller is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences and Member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the mechanisms that underpin the assembly of neural circuits during development. Feller is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Michael Paul Stryker is an American neuroscientist specializing in studies of how spontaneous neural activity organizes connections in the developing mammalian brain, and for research on the organization, development, and plasticity of the visual system in the ferret and the mouse.
A. Kimberley McAllister is an American cellular and molecular neuroscientist who specializes in synapse biology and neuroimmunology. She is director of a center for Neuroscience and a Professor of Neurology and Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior and the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics.
