Harvard Med Study Uncovers Another Level of Visual Perception

"Scientists have explored the complex puzzle of visual perception with increasing precision, discovering that individual neurons are tuned to detect very specific motions: up, but not down; right, but not left; and in all directions. These same neurons, which live in the brain's middle temporal visual area, are also sensitive to relative depth," notes Medical News Today. "Now a Harvard Medical School team led by Richard Born has uncovered key principles about the way those neurons work, explaining how the brain uses sensory information to guide the decisions that underlie behaviors. Their findings, reported in Neuron, illuminate the nature and origin of the neural signals used to solve perceptual tasks. Based on their previous work, the researchers knew that they could selectively interfere with signals concerning depth, while leaving the signals for direction of motion intact. They wanted to learn what happened next, after the visual information was received and used to make a judgment about the visual stimulus." Read more.

Scientists Grow Corneal Tissue

“A team of scientists from several Harvard-affiliated centers in Boston, MA, has grown human corneal tissue in mice using adult-derived human stem cells. They believe their breakthrough will bring hope to people who have impaired or lost vision due to burns, chemical injuries, or eye diseases that damage the cornea,” reports Medical News Today. “Dr. Bruce Ksander, associate professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, and also of Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, and colleagues write about their work - the first known example of tissue grown from a human stem cell - in the journal Nature. The cells that make up the cornea - the transparent ‘window’ of tissue at the front of the eye - are constantly damaged from blinking and exposure to the outside world. To repair the damage, the eye maintains a small number of ‘limbal stem cells’ at the edge of the cornea.” Read more.

Omega 3's Can Help with AMD, Says New Study

"Researchers from Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard Medical School and other institutions have demonstrated for the first time that the omega (ω)-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFAs), DHA and EPA, and their specific bioactive products derived from the cytochrome P450 (CYP) pathway, can influence choroidal neovascularization (CNV) and vascular leakage by modulating micro-environmental immune cell recruitment to the site of these lesions. Their findings will be published in PNAS Online Early Edition the week of June 16-20, 2014." That's a new post on Science Daily. Read more.

More Headway to Fix Macular Degeneration

“In a study published on line this week in the journal Human Molecular Genetics, Drs. Donita Garland, Rosario Fernandez-Godino, and Eric Pierce of the Ocular Genomics Institute at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School along with their colleagues, reported the unexpected finding that in mice genetically engineered to have an inherited form of macular degeneration, turning off the animals' complement system, a part of the immune system, prevented the disease.” That’s the start of a Science Daily post. Read more.

Genes of the Retina Catalogued

Medical News Today reports that "investigators at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School have published the most thorough description of gene expression in the human retina reported to date. In a study published in the journal BMC Genomics, Drs. Michael Farkas, Eric Pierce, and colleagues in the Ocular Genomics Institute (OGI) at Mass. Eye and Ear reported a complete catalog of the genes expressed in the retina." Read more.

Virtual Gaming Environment Helping the Blind

“JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) has published a new video article by Dr. Lotfi Merabet showing how researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School have developed a virtual gaming environment to help blind individuals improve navigation skills and develop a cognitive spatial map of unfamiliar buildings and public locations.” That’s a post from Medical News Today. Read more.

Reward Alone Stimulates Visual Cortex

“Once rhesus monkeys learn to associate a picture with a reward, the reward by itself becomes enough to alter the activity in the monkeys' visual cortex,” according to Medical News Today. “This finding was made by neurophysiologists Wim Vanduffel and John Arsenault (KU Leuven and Harvard Medical School) and American colleagues using functional brain scans and was published recently in the leading journal Neuron. Our visual perception is not determined solely by retinal activity. Other factors also influence the processing of visual signals in the brain.” Read more.

"New" Video Game Helps Blind

"Researchers have developed a new 'video' game for blind people that can help them learn about a new space using only audio cues, as reported in the open access journal PLOS ONE," notes Medical News Today. "The system, developed by a team led by Lotfi Merabet of Harvard Medical School and Jaime Sánchez of the University of Chile, is called the Audiobased Environment Simulator and uses only audio-based cues to allow blind users to learn about the layout of a previously unfamiliar building." Read more.