For the past 25 years, Wurtz, 55, has been studying vision and oculomotor control in rhesus monkeys--animals whose visual "system is remarkably similar to ours," he says. The ultimate goal of his research on this system, he says, is to determine "why it does not work in cases of trauma and disease in humans."
Among the phenomena Wurtz has investigated are saccadic eye movements, in which the eye moves rapidly from one object in the visual field to another. He and colleagues have found that neurons in an area of the brain called the superior colliculus discharge when such movements are made (R.H. Wurtz, Neurobiology of Saccadic Eye Movements, ier, Amsterdam, 1989).
They have devised a way of investigating this activity at the level of a single cell in awake monkeys by isolating a cell with a microelectrode, to "see how the cell discharges in relation to the impending saccadic ...
