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Making Movies
27 July 2018

Making Movies

Back in the Victorian era, forensic scientists believed that the last image a person saw before their death would be captured on the retina at the back of their eyeball. While this idea proved to be useless for solving crimes, there’s still a lot of interest in using modern techniques to decode what we see based on the activity of the nerve cells in the retina. Here, researchers have analysed the signals produced by a small patch of around 100 nerve cells in a rat’s retina as the animal watches a pattern of black dots moving on a white background (left panels). Using a complex computer algorithm, the scientists have decoded the signals to reproduce a short movie of the moving dots (right) with greater accuracy and definition than previous methods (middle). It’s not exactly HD TV, but it’s a step forward in understanding how the visual system processes information.

Written by Kat Arney

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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