The Neuroscience of Vision

Vision is the coolest sense we have, and there's very little doubt about it. Every day, the atmosphere around is suffused with countless photons of light. Nobody really has any clue what a photon is or what it looks like. Nevertheless, without photons, we would look very different and think very differently than we do. They have shaped our physical evolution and given us one of our prettiest organs, the eye.

The human eye is actually a protrusion that the brain sends out of the skull, like some weird plant. Light travels through its cornea and then its lens, the pair of which coordinate to focus the light beams onto the same place in the back of the eye, called the retina.

This website is devoted to what happens from this point onward, and so it skips over the physics of light, which, as an aside, is a rabbit-hole worth getting into if you've got the time. On this website you'll learn a little of the biology, chemistry and neural circuitry involved in vision. Click on Inside the Retina to get started.