NROC64H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Scotopic Vision, Rhodopsin, Neurotransmitter Receptor
Document Summary
Sensitivity to light enables animals, including humans to detect prey, predators and mates. Light is an electromagnetic energy that is emitted in form of waves. Waves crashes into objects and are absorbed, scattered, reflected and bent. The visual system can extract information about the world due to the nature of the electromagnetic waves and their interactions with the environment. It requires a lot of neural machinery and has provided new ways to communicate, given rise to brain mechanisms for predicting the trajectory of objects, events in time and space. Half of the human cerebral cortex is involved with analyzing the visual world. The mammalian visual system begins with the eye. The retina lies back the eye which contains photoreceptors specialized to convert light energy into neural activity. The rest of the eye acts as a camera which forms crisp, clear images of the world on the retina.
