Neurons in the human eye can correct errors. Free Technical Library News

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Neurons in the human eye are able to correct errors

24.11.2016

Researcher Jason Prentice of Princeton University in New Jersey (USA) and his colleagues found that the neurons of the human eye have a natural ability to correct errors in the composite signal they send to the brain.

Previous studies by scientists have shown that groups of neurons throughout the human nervous system transmit signals to the brain together. The signal in "collective" channels carries information that differs from that which is collected by each individual neuron individually. However, the details of such group work of neurons have not yet been sufficiently studied.

Dr. Prentice and his colleagues focused on ganglion cells in the human retina. These neurons, located at the back of the eye, collect information from other cells and relay it to the brain. At the same time, several retinal ganglion cells can control the same area at once. The researchers speculated that such redundancy might serve to correct errors.

In the experiment, the scientists used visual stimuli that activated groups of about 150 retinal ganglion cells with overlapping visual areas, and recorded the result. They used this data to build a mathematical model that describes how ganglion cells work to analyze and generate a signal.

The model showed that external signals more often activate the "collective" work of retinal ganglion neurons than signals from individual cells. This suggests that cooperative activity allows for error correction and results in more accurate visual information by suppressing the background noise introduced by the irregular activity of individual cells.

The new model describes this part of the human nervous system more accurately than the models developed earlier to study the collective signaling of the neural network. Not only does it lead to new ideas about how the retinal ganglion works, but it can also be used to study the neural codes in the rest of the human brain.

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