Mice watching film noir show the surprising complexity of vision cells
The eerie opening shot of the slow drive of a bomb-carrying car in Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil prompts strong reactions in film watchers. Now reactions in the brains of an unusual audience — mice — offer a major twist in our understanding of how brain cells parse visual scenes. Scientists used to think that each of the many cells in the brain’s visual system primarily handles a single job, such as responding to a black and white contrast. But a study published December 16 in Nature Neuroscience does away with that simplicity. Researchers including Saskia de Vries, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, used a powerful microscope to study 59,610 brain cells in the visual systems of live mice, through openings in their skulls. The researchers then watched whether these cells responded to (or ignored) a lineup of visual input, including clips from Touch of Evil and simpler images, such as drifting black stripes and...