Seeing Is Not as Simple as Black and White, Says Scientists

"While some things may be 'as simple as black and white,' this has not been the case for the circuits in the brain that make it possible for you to distinguish black from white," reports Medical News Today. "The patterns of light and dark that fall on the retina provide a wealth of information about the world around us, yet scientists still don't understand how this information is encoded by neural circuits in the visual cortex--a part of the brain that plays a critical role in building the neural representations that are responsible for sight. But things just got a lot clearer with the discovery that the majority of neurons in visual cortex respond selectivity to light vs dark, and they combine this information with selectivity for other stimulus features to achieve a detailed representation of the visual scene." Read more.