The split view of motion

摘要

In both fruitflies and vertebrates, signals from photoreceptor cells are immediately split into two opposing channels in the downstream neurons. This might facilitate the computation of visual motion. See Letter p.300rnNearly a century ago, the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal compared the vertebrate retina with the fly's compound eye and noted similarities in their neural circuits. He redrew the cell bodies of the fly's monopolar cells, transforming them to vertebrate retinal bipolar neurons.