Introduction to Remote Viewing (2009)

 

On and Off Parasol Cells- E.J. Chichilnisky, Ph.D.
A unique neural recording system is being developed by an international team of high energy physicists, which is able to record simultaneously the tiny electrical signals generated by hundreds of the retinal output neurons, as co -opted vision is one of the essential elements of Human Computer Interface. By comparing a clearly defined visual input with the electrical output of the retina, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies were able to trace neuronal circuitry that connects individual photoreceptors with retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that carry visuals signals from the eye to the brain.

Their measurements not only reveal computations in a neural circuit at the elementary resolution of individual neurons but also shed light on the neural code used by the retina to relay visual information to the brain . E.J. Chichilnisky, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratories. "needs to understand neuronal computations in the visual system which can ultimately perfect a computer's system of reconstructing a human's visual system with or without the aid of neural prosthetics .Several teams are devising .unique neural recording systems so a super computer can both store our senses and also "talk back" to one's senses by remote means of .A.I. and Virtual Reality based interfaces.
Human Testing focused on such" Mind Mining "methods and technology to speed the process od decoding up are being developed by international teams of physicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz; the AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland; and the University of Glasgow, UK. This vision system is able to record simultaneously the tiny electrical signals generated by hundreds of the retinal output neurons that transmit information about the outside visual world to the brain with nanotechnology that binds to a human participant's neural tissue The recordings are made at high-speed (over ten million samples each second) with special software and special computers made specifically to capture neural data .The template for the visual decoding 'bank" had to be created based upon of wide sampling of patterns and algorithms and 'de-noising "transcriptions on human subjects for the programs to mimic not only how the human eye "sees" but how the human mind perceives the signals that "make 's another 's inner sight" unique and therefore useful for standardization .

Visual processing begins when photons entering the eye strike one or more of the 125 million light-sensitive nerve cells in the retina. This first layer of cells, which are known as rods and cones, converts the information into electrical signals and sends them to an intermediate layer, which in turn relays signals to the 20 or so distinct types of retinal ganglion cells.
In an earlier study, Chichilnisky and his team found that each type of retinal ganglion cells forms a seamless lattice covering visual space that transmits a complete visual image to the brain. In the current study, postdoctoral researcher and co-first author Greg D. Field, Ph.D., and his collaborators zoomed in on the pattern of connectivity between these layers of retinal ganglion cells and the full lattice of cone receptors.

The Salk researchers simultaneously recorded hundreds of retinal ganglion cells, and based on density and light response properties, identified five cell types: ON and OFF midget cells, ON and OFF parasol cells, and small bistratified cells, which collectively account for approximately 75 percent of all retinal ganglion cells.
To resolve the fine structure of receptive fields-the small, irregularly shaped windows through which neurons in retina view the world-the authors used stimuli with tenfold smaller pixels. "Instead of a diffuse region of light sensitivity, we detected punctate islands of light sensitivity separated by regions of no light sensitivity," Chichilnisky states.

When combined with information on spectral sensitivities of individual cones, maps of these punctate islands not only allowed the researchers to recreate the full cone mosaic found in the retina, but also to conclude which cone fed information to which retinal ganglion cell.
"Just by stimulating input cells and taking a high density recording from output cells, we can identify all individual input and output cells and find out who is connected to whom," says Chichilnisky.

1999

Monday, October 11, Published at 19:10 GMT 20:10 UK

Sci/Tech
Looking through cats' eyes
Fuzzy but recognisable
By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse
Published are the first pictures from an extraordinary experiment which has probed what it is like to look through the eyes of another creature. As reported on BBC News Online last week, a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing. 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.