Monday, October 11, 1999

Sci/Tech

Looking through cats' eyes.By recording the electrical activity of nerve cells in the thalamus, a region of the brain that receives signals from the eyes, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley were able to view these shapes.

The team used what they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to convert the signals from the stimulated cells into visual images.

Dr Yang Dan, Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at UC Berkeley, Fei Li and Garrett Stanley, now Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University conducted 11 experiments.

They recorded the output from 177 brain cells that responded to light and dark in the cat's field of view.