© Anatomical Travelogue/Photo Researchers
In the early visual system, signals travel from the retina through the visual thalamus near the middle of the brain to area V1 at the back of the brain. V1 sends signals to the rest of visual cortex.
Since long before the word neuroscience was coined, the community has devoted substantial resources to studying the visual system, and for good reason. The visual system occupies a huge portion of the brain–about 40% of the cerebral cortex in monkeys. But with roughly 30 processing areas in the cortex, fed either directly or indirectly from the primary visual area, V1, deciding the correct entry point is a challenge.
With a few well characterized exceptions, not much is known about the responses of these processing centers. Indeed, besides conjecturing that it must somehow be advantageous, we don't really know why visual processing is distributed into so many areas. The ...
