Mahowald and Mead appraise adaptation as "...the most crucial function of the first three layers of the retina. The photo receptors, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells take widely varying amounts of incoming light and adapt their response to produce a signal with a much narrower dynamic range that nonetheless captures the important information in a scene. Adaptation is necessary if the system is to respond sensitively to small local changes in the image against a background whose intensity may vary by a factor of a million from midnight to high noon."
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