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Retinal ganglion cells project to the thalamus and superior colliculus, where their axonal terminals form orderly topographic maps. There is converging evidence that, during development, correlated impulse activity and competition between axonal inputs for postsynaptic targets are essential for establishing orderly sets of connections. In simultaneous recordings from 100 ganglion cells in the neonatal cat retina, slow waves of correlated impulses are found even before photoreceptors are present

Written byTerrence Sejnowski

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C.J. Shatz, "Impulse activity and the patterning of connections during CNS development," Neuron, 5, 745-56, December 1990. (Stanford University School of Medicine, Calif.)

The barn owl can localize sound sources. Two pathways carrying information about sound have been traced into the brain of the owl, one computing interaural time differences and the other analyzing interaural amplitude differences. These two streams are combined to create an array of neurons that form a spatial representation in the inferior colliculus. Remarkably, the strategies used to construct this map are similar to those used in the brain of Eigenmannia, a weakly electric fish, to compute frequency shifts for its jamming-avoidance response.

M. Konishi, "Deciphering the brain's codes," Neural Computation, 3, 1-18, March 1991. (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena) Some inherited diseases in humans, such as Huntington's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cause degeneration of specific groups of neurons. Genetic mutations have been found in ...

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