summary for 2/6, applied physics

Dear Parents!

Neuroscience last Monday was all about the somatosensory system (for our sense of touch) and the visual system.

We learned how a lot of cortical area is devoted to processing sensory information from certain body parts like our fingers and how less cortical area is devoted to body parts like our leg. In a prior session, some students measured their two-point discrimination (or ability to identify two points some distance apart as two distinct points). These students found that the ability to discriminate two points a certain distance apart was much easier for some body parts than others. They tested this on the palm of the hand, the arm, the forehead, back, leg, and foot. We took those measurements and entered them in on a website (https://www.maxplanckflorida.org/fitzpatricklab/homunculus/) to create our personalized homunculi (a homunculus is a representation of the body where the size of the body part represents the amount of cortical area devoted to that body part). I encourage the students who haven't gotten a chance to do this to play around with this! Instructions on how to make the measurement tool is provided on the website.

We noted some similarities between the visual system and the somatosensory system. We examined how far our visual fields extend and found that the visual field for the left eye overlaps (but not completely) with the visual field for the right eye. We also learned about blind spots and found our very own blind spots! We then covered the visual pathway, and saw how damage to different areas leads to different types of visual field deficits. We also learned about the primary visual cortex (V1) and how V1 neurons (which we can think of as edge detectors) respond selectively to lines at specific orientations and some also respond selectively to lines moving in certain directions. We ended by learning how increasingly complex visual information (e.g., shapes, location and spatial organization) gets processed.